Politics

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

Sunday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Revenge of the Blairites

Lord Mandelson and his protégé Chuka Umunna ended up sitting next to one another on the Marr sofa at the end of the programme. Both had spent their interviews setting out what Labour had been doing wrong for the past five years, though Mandelson was markedly more savage than Umunna. The Labour peeer was particularly keen to make the point that New Labour had been too quickly discarded in favour of an ‘experiment’. He said that ‘the awful, shocking thing about this election is Labour could have won it’, adding: ‘The reason we lost it and lost it so badly is in 2010 we discarded New Labour, rather than revitalising

Saturday

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Starting gun fires on Labour leadership contest as candidates set out their stall

Inevitably, the Sunday papers are full of pieces by Labour leadership hopefuls dissecting why their party did so badly and offering their initial prescriptions. They are actually all rather slow out of the blocks as David Lammy said this morning that ‘certainly for people like me it’s absolutely time to step up into a leadership role’. So in the Observer we have Chuka Umunna, positioning himself, unsurprisingly, as the Blairite candidate. He says the party had ‘too little to say to the majority of people in the middle’ and that ‘we need a different, big-tent approach’ (referencing the master). He also says: – Labour didn’t engage effectively with fears that

Steerpike Steerpike

Laurie Penny defends war memorial vandalism at anti-Tory march

After David Cameron won a surprise Conservative majority in the general election, angry anti-austerity protesters gathered near Parliament Square today to let their outrage be known. During the demonstration, a war memorial, honouring the women of the Second World War, was vandalised with ‘F— tory scum’ graffiti. While the crime was greeted with outrage by both the left and right, Laurie Penny, the Guardian feminist, appears to have defended the vandalism on Twitter, saying she doesn’t ‘have a problem with this’: Although most users were quick to suggest that she ought to show more respect, Penny has at least managed to find one kindred spirit. Charlie Gilmour, who was jailed for his behaviour at the student riots during which he swang from the Union Jack on

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Justice for Michael Gove

Michael Gove is the new Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor, Downing Street has just announced. Chris Grayling will move to become Leader of the House. Number 10 is also confirming that, as David Cameron promised during the election campaign, Nicky Morgan will continue as Education Secretary. Becoming Justice Secretary marks a return to Gove running a big department after his service as chief whip in the run up to the general election. I suspect that there will be two things that Gove concentrates on. First, sorting out Britain’s relationship with the ECHR. Grayling had already committed the Tories to withdrawing from the Convention if parliament and courts here could not

Sebastian Payne

There was one pollster who predicted a Conservative victory: Jim Messina

The shock election result has resulted in a lot of finger pointing. Why did the pollsters not see a Tory victory on the horizon? Was Labour deluded in thinking they had any chance of making it into government? Judging from conversations I’ve had with Conservatives, those inside the party weren’t particularly certain about getting the most seats either, never mind a majority. The leadership campaigns were even prepped for a contest soon after May 7. But there was one man who did see a Tory victory coming: Jim Messina. The Obama guru and former White House deputy chief of staff was hired by the Tories for his data nuance and his

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: a poem for the victorious Nicola Sturgeon

In a 1985 interview with the New Republic,  Mario Cuomo famously said that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Last week, we asked competitors to put their own twist on Kipling’s rousing poem. The winners are below IF – For Nicola (by Brian Murdoch) If you can lose a referendum and still act       As if you’d won it, time and time again; If you can claim you’re going to make a pact       But never make your real conditions plain; If you can try to split from the UK       Then six months later make it clear to see That now you want to rule

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

With 56 SNPs and just one Ukip MP, how can the Commons reflect the UK’s political will?

Firm, but unfair – that’s the motto of Westminster’s first-past-the-post voting system and Conservatives will today be raising a glass to it. But the House of Commons is now a very poor reflection of Britain’s political sympathies. It took just 25,970 voters to return an SNP politican to parliament. This compares 34,240 for a Tory and 40,280 for Labour. In the circumstances, the Tories needn’t moan so much about the boundaries: the system paid out for them pretty well. But the other parties? For a Scottish Conservative, the vote-to-seat ratio is an almighty 434,000 to 1. And if you think that’s bad, consider Scottish Labour: 707,147 voters are now represented by

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Why Ukip will descend into sectarian chaos

Yes, yes, I know it’s supposed to be ‘unfair’ that Ukip ended up with only one MP while securing 13 per cent of the popular vote. But that’s first-past-the-post for you. You have to win a seat to get into Parliament. The British electorate was offered the chance to to ditch FPTP back in 2011 and said, nope, we’ll keep the unfair system. As for Ukip coming second and third in all those Labour seats, it’s impressive but I suspect not terribly significant. White northern working-class voters were protesting against the fact that none of the major parties gave a toss about the destruction of their communities by the merciless progress of

Friday

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The reshuffle has begun – but the real excitement will happen on Monday

David Cameron has reappointed several of the most senior members of the government. George Osborne stays as Chancellor, Theresa May remains Home Secretary, Philip Hammond Foreign Secretary and Michael Fallon Defence Secretary. Indeed, the only change is Osborne taking over William Hague’s old First Secretary of State title. This is formal recognition that Osborne will, in effect, be the deputy Prime Minister of this Tory majority government. We are told to expect the rest of the reshuffle on Monday. There’ll be particular interest in who Cameron chooses to be his chief whip, a role that takes on particular importance with this small majority. There’s also the question of what Cameron

The Spectator

Cabinet reshuffle: George Osborne, Theresa May, Michael Fallon and Philip Hammond remain in their posts

David Cameron has ‘reshuffled’ his Cabinet. George Osborne has been re-appointed as Chancellor, and will also be First Secretary of State, as were William Hague and Peter Mandelson. The title implies that he is the most senior minister.  Theresa May will remain as Home Secretary. Philip Hammond will also remain in his role as Foreign Secretary, and Michael Fallon will keep his job as Defence Secretary.

Sebastian Payne

The final 2015 general election results

All of the results of the 2015 general election are in and we have a result: the Conservatives have a major of 12 seats. Here is a breakdown of the results for each of the parties: [datawrapper chart=”http://static.spectator.co.uk/PifSa/index.html”] And a few other figures you might find interesting: Turnout was 66.1 per cent, up from 65.1 per cent in 2010 19.4 per cent of MPs in the new parliament will be female, up from 15.8 per cent in 2010 Counting will begin tomorrow for 9,000 council elections in England

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Today Britain has changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.

So this is what history feels like. Painful, frankly.  None of the usual meteorological metaphors – earthquake, hurricane, avalanche, landslide, tsunami – seem strong enough. Make no mistake, Theresa May was right. This is the biggest constitutional drama – even crisis – since the abdication. Actually, it’s bigger than that. It’s the greatest (internal) shock to the British state since the 1918 election. Sinn Fein won 47 percent of the vote in Ireland that year as it all but swept southern Ireland. The Irish Parliamentary Party lost 61 of its 67 seats, every one of them to Eamonn de Valera’s party who increased their representation from 6 to 67. As then, so

Sebastian Payne

Listen: The Spectator’s verdict on the 2015 general election

In our final podcast special of the 2015 general election, Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth, Isabel Hardman and I discuss the astonishing results and what we can expect from David Cameron’s new Conservative government. Are we finally going to see the unrestrained Cameron? Who is already limbering up to replace Ed Miliband as Labour leader? And what will the SNP and Liberal Democrats do next? You can subscribe to the View from 22 through iTunes and have it delivered to your computer or iPhone every week, or you can use the player below:

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Channel 4’s The Vote reviewed: ‘complex, acute, very funny and oddly moving’

He’s back on top form. James Graham has taken the unlikeliest setting, a polling station during the last hour of a general election, and turned it into a beautifully crafted comedy drama. The Vote at the Donmar was broadcast on Channel 4 last night at 8.30 p.m. We’re in a knife-edge London marginal constituency where a polling blunder has been uncovered. A wizened pensioner voted twice by accident. Once in his brother’s name, once in his own. Panic stations. Democracy is threatened. Kirsty, an excitable teller, tries to even up the score by persuading a relative who hasn’t voted to cast his ballot under her discreet direction. This he does. But he votes for the wrong

Steerpike Steerpike

BBC mistake SNP MP for Nicola Sturgeon’s husband

Given that staff at the BBC have been providing rolling election coverage, it’s understandable that they may be rather tired. Even so, Mr S was surprised to see that BBC veteran Huw Edwards described an SNP MP and Nicola Sturgeon as Scotland’s power couple. Speaking over footage of Sturgeon walking alongside Patrick Grady, the recently appointed SNP MP for Glasgow North, Edwards mistook Grady for Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell. While both may be lacking in the hair department, there are a few years’ difference between the two: Happily, Edwards realised his mistake while on air and performed a swift u-turn, apologising for the mix-up. Surely it’s time for the BBC to give Edwards an election recess?

Steerpike Steerpike

It was the Standard what won it, apparently

In 1992 the Sun claimed it was them ‘wot won it’, fast forward to the next time the Tories achieved a majority and an editor of a different paper is claiming ‘victory’: FROM: Sarah Sands TO: ES ALL (editorial) SENT: Fri 08/05/2015 10:16 SUBJECT: Congratulations Well done everyone on our superbly professional election coverage. It is the sweetest victory for the Evening Standard. A million copies today. Mr S’s spies report ‘dismay’ in the Standard newsroom today after their paper endorsed the Tories – against junior staff wishes – and only went and bloody called it correctly. However, a cynic would note that the London results were the only sliver of

Steerpike Steerpike

Al Murray faces £500 fine for failing to win five per cent of vote

Nigel Farage has failed to win in South Thanet. However, he can take some comfort that he came second in the hotly contested seat. Alas the same cannot be said for Al Murray and his FUKP party. The Pub Landlord only managed to muster 318 votes. That means that Murray will need to pay back his £500 election deposit. However, given that Murray has used the election publicity to give his tour a boost and bring out a political book, it may not be too difficult to find the funds.

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

The biggest loser of the night? Russell Brand

Forget Vince Cable. Forget, if you can, Ed Balls (and I know that’s hard, because what a joyous result that was). Expel from your mind the image of Nick Clegg crying into his cornflakes this morning while texting his old pals in the Euro-oligarchy to see if they will give him a new plush job that involves no contact with pesky plebs. For last night there was an even bigger loser than those guys. Russell Brand. Or ‘Rusty Rockets’, as his politics-packed Twitterfeed has it. Rusty being the operative word, for now we know that the much-hyped ability of slebs like Brand to sway public sentiment is in a serious

Steerpike Steerpike

Liberal Democrats face soaring fines for failing to win enough votes

Oh dear. Not only have the Liberal Democrats only won eight seats so far compared to the 56 taken in 2010, many candidates face losing their deposit. If a candidate fails to win five per cent of the vote in their desired constituency then they are subject to a £500 fine. Unfortunately the Liberal Democrats have had many candidates do exactly that. So much so that the Twitter account LibDem Deposits has been set up just to keep a tally of their fines: It started off modestly: Then spiralled: The account is now reporting that the current total of fines is an enormous £157,000. This would mean that out of the 631 Liberal Democrat candidates that

Sebastian Payne

Exclusive: David Cameron tells CCHQ staffers ‘this is the sweetest victory of them all’

After a very good night of results, David Cameron addressed party staffers at Conservative HQ in Westminster this morning. A clip of the Prime Minister’s victory speech has made its way to Coffee House. You can watch what Cameron said below: Exclusive: David Cameron’s victory speech to CCHQ staffers this morning #ge2015 #conservative https://t.co/nKtdhBVxr7 — Sebastian Payne (@SebastianEPayne) May 8, 2015 Here is the text of part of what Cameron told the gathered party staffers, all of whom appear to be a very jubilant mood: ‘..to be with you guys and say thank you, you are an amazing team. I’m not an old man but I remember casting a vote in ’87