Politics

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

Thursday

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Jeremy Corbyn appears to endorse Diane Abbott for London Mayor (again)

Last week Diane Abbott was caught in a sticky situation after her campaign sent out a text to supporters that was allegedly from Jeremy Corbyn. It claimed that the Labour leadership favourite is backing her to be the Labour candidate to run for Mayor. Although Corbyn and Abbott are close, Corbyn’s team were quick to distance themselves, claiming the ‘text wasn’t authorised’. It was then reported that Corbyn had decided not to formally support a candidate in the mayoral race. So Mr S can’t help but wonder if Abbott’s campaign leaflets have been ‘authorised’? Last night at the Evening Standard‘s Labour mayoral hustings, Abbott had her team hand out campaign literature which carried a

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How Jeremy Corbyn could boost David Cameron’s majority

Tories tend to think that Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader will be fabulously useful for their party, returning them an even bigger majority in 2020 and pitching his own party into such turmoil that it struggles to work as an effective Opposition. But one benefit of his leadership to the existing Tory majority has been overlooked, which is the effect it would have on the Democratic Unionist Party. Sources in the DUP point out to me that given Corbyn’s friendship with Sinn Fein, they would be unable to work with Labour to exert pressure on the Conservatives in key votes. This may mean that the eight DUP MPs are more likely

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Zac Goldsmith cancels speech at Bow Group summer party

Oh dear. This week the Bow Group sent out invitations to members and supporters announcing that Zac Goldsmith would give the speech at the Conservative think tank’s summer party. ‘Our keynote speech will be from Zac Goldsmith, the Member of Parliament for Richmond Park who is currently seeking the Conservative Party nomination to succeed Boris Johnson MP as Mayor of London. After Zac’s keynote speech, he will hold an extended Q&A to answer any questions from the audience.’ However, some naysayers began to query why the Tory MP was speaking at the event, after the Tory think tank made the news during the election campaign for backing a number of Ukip MPs including Mark

Sebastian Payne

Personalities, backstories and the threat of Zac dominate Labour’s London mayoral race

The Evening Standard hosted a hustings for Labour’s mayoral candidacy last night and it appears the contest is being fought more over clichés than anything else. The six candidates opened by extolling their love of London: Diane Abbott (Stoke Newington MP) claimed London has suffered from ‘too much social cleansing’. Tessa Jowell (former Olympics minister the bookies’ favourite to win) said ‘the engine of our city must be constantly recharged’. Sadiq Khan (MP for Tooting) argued ‘London needs a modern Mayor for a modern city’. David Lammy (MP for Tottenham) said ‘we need a mayor with a serious plan’. Gareth Thomas (MP for Harrow West) acknowledged that his campaign ‘isn’t the best financed, but as you can

Philip Delves-Broughton

How Hillary can win it – for the Republicans

 New York [audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/howtofixtherefugeecrisis/media.mp3″ title=”Philip Delves Broughton and Freddy Gray discuss how Hillary can swing it for the Republicans” startat=847] Listen [/audioplayer]Remember the fizz around Gordon Brown’s election campaign in 2010? The excitement he brought to the trail? The eerily intimate connection with the electorate? No, nor can I. But conjure up what you can and mix it with the thrill of a hot afternoon locked in a community centre discussing renovations to the ping-pong room and you’ll have a sense of the vibe around Hillary Clinton’s latest campaign for president. The American media is bored of her and the polls show her support slipping, even against a Republican field

Wednesday

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Labour out Conservative MP in #Tories4Corbyn crackdown

Labour’s verification process has been under a lot of scrutiny in recent weeks as more and more Tories have claimed they have successfully joined as a supporter of the party in order to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and ‘condemn Labour to years in the political wilderness’. Labour insist that they have a crack team successfully weeding out non-Labour supporters from the genuine new joiners. This is a point that they seem rather keen to make known. Today the party’s press office has tweeted the Tory MP Tim Loughton to tell him that his application has sadly been declined: Thanks for your donation to the Labour Party @timloughton. However as a

Sebastian Payne

Inside Ukip: now the infighting is over, the Kippers are readying for the battle of their lives

Ukip has been especially quiet over the last few months. Following the party’s disappointing result in the general election, Nigel Farage’s ‘unresignation’ and the briefing wars, the party has purposefully kept its head down. With Farage’s return to the spotlight last week, Kippers are gearing up for the fight of their lifetime. This is what has been going on inside Ukip in recent weeks and what you can expect to see from the so-called ‘people’s army’ over the next few months. Give peace a chance Since the internal turmoil and the ‘break’ Farage was urged to take by his colleagues, much of the party’s tensions have calmed down. Some attribute this to the pressure cooker atmosphere

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David Cameron’s former speechwriter is ‘rooting’ for Jeremy Corbyn

After David Cameron’s former speechwriter Clare Foges kicked off her new career outside of No.10 with a blistering editorial in the Times criticising her former employer over a range of issues including the bedroom tax, doubts began to surface that she was not a true blue. Still, even Mr S was surprised to read in an interview with the Evening Standard that the Prime Minister’s old political advisor is ‘rooting for Jeremy Corbyn’. What’s more, the gesture is not simply part of the jovial #ToriesForCorbyn movement: ‘Foges lives alone in Archway where Jeremy Corbyn is her MP (she’s rooting for him because she lives in the area, not as part of a Tory plot).’ Foges —

Patrick French

Sorry, Shashi Tharoor, but Britain doesn’t owe India any reparations

As one of a parade of speakers debating the British empire at the Oxford Union, Shashi Tharoor cannot have expected his short speech to be viewed more than three million times. Reparations, he told his audience, ‘are a tool for you to atone for the wrongs that have been done. Let me say with the greatest possible respect: it’s a bit rich to oppress, enslave, kill, torture, maim people for 200 years and then celebrate the fact that they are democratic at the end of it.’ Tharoor, an MP in the opposition Congress party, was lauded by the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who said, ‘What he spoke there reflected

Sebastian Payne

Suzanne Evans running to be Ukip’s London Mayoral candidate

Ukip’s deputy chairman Suzanne Evans has announced she is seeking the party’s nomination for the 2016 London Mayor election. Speaking to Iain Dale on LBC this morning, Evans said from the off she is very unlikely to become Mayor, but that she hopes to influence the race and offer Londoners a difference: ‘I have thrown my hat into the ring to apply to be Ukip candidate for Mayor of London and or an London assembly member. Let’s be realistic, I don’t think London is going to have a Ukip mayor any time soon. ‘But I think it’s time for London to have a different view, a different approach. I think there are a growing amount of

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

War crimes and renationalising the railways: the latest twists and turns in the Labour leadership contest

The Labour leadership contest has taken so many odd turns already that a few more might return it to a vague normal track. But with Jeremy Corbyn announcing last night that he thought Tony Blair could be tried for war crimes over Iraq, and Andy Burnham appearing to tack left on rail re-nationalisation, there are still a few turns to go. Here’s where each of the campaigns have got to: Jeremy Corbyn The frontrunner, miles ahead in all published polling and constituency party nominations, and capable of summoning good crowds to his rallies, or at least to peer excitedly through the windows at his rallies. Last night Corbyn told Newsnight

Sebastian Payne

Today’s Tube strike is about people vs. technology, not unions and Tories

At 6:30pm this evening, London will descend into chaos as the City deals with yet another Tube strike. This time, Transport for London and the RMT trade union are squabbling over the introduction of the Night Tube — services running throughout Fridays and Saturday nights on a few lines. The union isn’t happy about the disruption it will cause to its members’ lives, while TfL feels it has done it utmost to offer a fair deal. Mick Cash, Bob Crow’s replacement as general secretary of the RMT, said on the Today programme that the strike was about putting ‘more and more work onto less and less people’ but insisted he wasn’t against the Night

Tuesday

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Jeremy Corbyn causes problems for Newsnight

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership bid has so far managed to inspire a legion of new supporters to join the Labour party. Alas, his unexpected popularity is also causing a problem for some members of the media. After the Guardian launched an in-house investigation into whether their own Corbyn coverage was bias against him, Emily Maitlis, who has interviewed him for tonight’s Newsnight, has written a gushing blog post titled ‘Prepping to meet “the man of the moment”‘.  In it, she says that his tendency to veer off from textbook politician answers caused her a problem when preparing for the interview: ‘On the train to Leeds my producer Ed Brown and I are putting together a list

Sebastian Payne

Tory grandees poke fun at Andy Burnham over retiring remarks

One of Andy Burnham’s problems is his occasional pandering towards populism. In an interview with GQ magazine, the Labour leadership contender tries to talk up his credentials as an ordinary bloke and says he doesn’t intend to spend the rest of his life in politics, arguing there should be a limit on how long MPs should remain the Commons: ‘Not necessarily, no. I think modern politics is intense – it’s changed in my 14 years in parliament. I always felt I would give it my all for 20, 25 years. Never put a time limit on it but then maybe finish off my career by doing something different. If you’ve had a seat for 25 years,

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

The Osborne Powerhouse is paying off: Chancellor soars ahead of other leadership rivals

George Osborne is having a good summer. He got in first with wooing the new intake of Tory MPs, to the extent that many of them seem slightly besotted with the warm and friendly Chancellor who welcomes them cheerily to drinks events. He humiliated Boris Johnson with jokes about his ‘dilapidated’ campaign bunker – and was at the very least rather pleased that Theresa May ended up humiliating the Mayor by refusing to approve the use of water cannon in London. Now he’s top of the ConHome Tory leader survey for the first time. The Chancellor has risen nine points and got the support of 30.9 per cent of the

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Milifandom founder: I back Andy Burnham (aka my headmaster’s brother)

Over the weekend Andy Burnham’s leadership campaign received a much needed boost from the founder of the Milifandom Abby Tomlinson. The 17-year-old declared that after meeting with each of the leadership contenders, it was Burnham rather than Jeremy Corbyn who she would be backing for Labour leader: ‘I have decided that I am going to be voting for Andy Burnham. I have a number of reasons for making this decision and not enough space for them all, so I’ll try and explain a few important ones. It was at the hustings I attended in Warrington that I realised something. Before that Saturday, none of the candidates had really inspired me. As

Sebastian Payne

Michael Fallon: ‘Iraqi forces are slowly but surely beginning to push ISIL back’

Is the government set to bring bombing Islamic State terrorists in Syria before the Commons soon? The Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has announced that the RAF’s Tornado aircraft will be kept in service until 2017 for air strikes against the Islamic State, to ‘ensure we maintain this crucial operational tempo’. On the Today programme, Fallon explained that the aircraft have ‘proven their worth’ and have helped Iraqi forces in the fight against ISIL: ‘The Iraqi forces are slowly but surely beginning to push ISIL back. They have recaptured Tikrit, there is a campaign going on at the moment to liberate Ramadi. They are recruiting to both the army and to the

Monday

Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

The discreet charm of the Labour bourgeoisie

In the early 1960s a satirical combo called the Chad Mitchell Trio sang of the anti-communist paranoia of the John Birch Society (a forerunner of today’s Tea Party, as those among you who study the history of demagogic delusion will know). The reds were so ubiquitous that: There’s no one left but thee and we, (and we’re not sure of thee). You cannot trust your neighbour Or even next of kin If mommy is a commie, then you have to turn her in. Move from the far right to far left – a trip so short it’s like nipping to the shops – and you find that critical coverage of Corbyn

Sebastian Payne

A beginner’s guide to Corbynomics

‘Corbynomics’, aka Jeremy Corbyn’s plans for the UK economy, has entered the Westminster lexicon today. It appears to consist of the work primarily of one man, Richard Murphy. The director of TaxResearch UK, who advises various charities and trade unions on tax matters, has taken credit for the handful of economic policies Corbyn has announced so far, which have been attacked by Labour’s shadow chancellor Chris Leslie today. Jeremy Corbyn has acknowledged that I am the author of much of his economic policy. Not a single journalist has called me about it — Richard Murphy (@RichardJMurphy) August 3, 2015 In case you missed the birth of Corbynomics two weeks ago — the launch event

Charles Moore Charles Moore

There’s nothing hip about Jeremy Corbyn’s beard

Mr Corbyn has a beard. If he becomes leader, he will be the first bearded leader of any main party since Keir Hardie. The beard as a fashion item is now back, generally in shaped and even waxed form. But Mr Corbyn’s one owes nothing to fashion. It is a 1960s political beard, already obsolete when he first brought it into the House of Commons in 1983. Like Lord Hailsham who, as Mrs Thatcher’s Lord Chancellor, continued to wear a bowler hat long after it had disappeared from everything but hunt puppy shows, Orange parades and A Clockwork Orange, Mr Corbyn is undaunted by the passage of time. I must try not