Politics

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

Thursday

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Labour majority of 170, says exit poll

The polls have closed and the exit poll is in. The BBC exit poll projects that Labour will win a landslide of 410 MPs and the Conservatives will be left with 131 seats. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats will win 61 seats, the SNP ten seats and Reform 13 seats. This would mean a Labour majority of 170 – and would be the Tories’ worst ever result. If this comes to pass, this will be Labour’s largest number of seats, but a slightly smaller majority than the Tony Blair landslide of 179. This seems to be down to the the level of success that Ed Davey’s party has enjoyed (if the

Coffee House

As it happened: Starmer appoints cabinet after landslide win

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has appointed his cabinet after winning a landslide in the general election. Rachel Reeves has been announced as the first ever female Chancellor and Angela Rayner is deputy prime minister. With one seat left to count, Labour has won 412 seats, and the Tories 121. Starmer will enter government on a vote share of 35 per cent, the lowest of any majority government in the democratic era. Here’s what unfolded: Here’s how the election unfolded on our live blog: 

James Heale James Heale

Your guide for general election night 2024

After six weeks of campaigning, we are finally here. The bongs of Big Ben at 10 p.m. mark the end of voting across the UK and the start of an election night full of drama. Labour are set to make huge gains at the respective expense of the Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland. The Liberal Democrats will try to topple as much of the ‘blue wall’ across the south as possible, while Reform will hope Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and Lee Anderson enter the new Commons too. Following the publication of the exit poll, there is then a lull until shortly before midnight when the first seats

John Keiger John Keiger

The plot to stop Marine Le Pen’s National Rally

This week France has drifted from surprise to confusion and panic as Sunday’s second round vote approaches. The bien-pensant centre-left weekly Nouvel Obs’ cover says it all. Black lettering on a red background menacingly warns: ‘Avoiding the Worst’; ‘The National Rally at the gates of power’. Yet the National Rally is an officially recognised legitimate mainstream party. France is not staring into the abyss. But if we were to indulge in such gloom-ridden musings what would be France’s post-electoral worst case scenarios. Let us begin gently. Marine Le Pen called this ‘an administrative coup d’etat’ In the event the National Rally cannot form a government on Monday, moves are already afoot by Macronist

Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

This election is a pale imitation of democracy

Does anyone else feel like they’re living through a simulation of democracy? All the apparatus of democracy has been laid out before us today. The polling booths, the ballot papers, the boxes to stuff them in. But the stuff of democracy, the substance of it, feels oddly, sadly absent. We’re being canvassed, but not engaged. We’re being asked to vote, but not to think. Not really. This imitation of democracy is unsustainable The whole thing has felt like a phantom election. Not to get too Baudrillard about it, but is an election even taking place? It must be because they’ve been talking about it on television. You might have seen

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The reckoning: it’s payback time for voters

39 min listen

This week: the reckoning. Our cover piece brings together the political turmoil facing the West this week: Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron, and Joe Biden all face tough tests with their voters. But what’s driving this instability? The Spectator’s economics editor Kate Andrews argues it is less to do with left and right, and more a problem of incumbency, but how did this situation arise? Kate joined the podcast to discuss her argument, alongside former Cambridge Professor, John Keiger, who writes in the magazine about the consequences that France’s election could have on geopolitics (2:32).  Next: what role does faith play in politics? Senior editor at the religious journal First Things Dan Hitchens explores

William Atkinson

The Tories don’t deserve my vote – but they’ll still get it

Sometimes I feel like the only person in Britain who is intending to vote Conservative. I know this can’t be true, since I have a few colleagues at ConservativeHome, and someone has been putting blue leaflets through my door. I assume Rishi Sunak will vote Tory, but he might have been distracted by dreams of Santa Monica. Not many others are hoping today proves more Britain 1970 than Canada 1993. Half of all voters want us Tories completely wiped out, including 24 per cent of those who voted for us in 2019, according to a poll published last month. And a YouGov survey published yesterday revealed that almost half of

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Why German carmakers don’t want EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles

I recant. On a number of occasions I have asserted that the European Union is run by lobbyists acting on behalf of French farmers and the German car industry. It seems I was wrong – or perhaps that I have become wrong as the politics of global trade has shifted. A more accurate way of putting it would be to say that the EU is run by people who think they are acting in the interests of French farmers and the German car industry, but who are not quite plugged in to what those industries really want. It is a typical case of EU protectionism. However, this time, there is a twist At

Sam Bidwell

The problem with outdated Commonwealth voting rights

It’s time to decolonise Britain. And no, I’m not talking about tearing down statues of Victorian imperialists, or running roughshod over the school curriculum with self-flagellating historical revisionism. Instead, I’m talking about the fact that more than two billion people worldwide have the automatic right to vote in British elections, thanks to an archaic feature of our post-colonial citizenship laws.  Ludicrous as this might sound, Commonwealth citizens – that is, citizens of any of the Commonwealth’s 56 member states – enjoy automatic voting rights in the UK, whatever their reason for settlement in the UK and regardless of their intention to seek citizenship. When the ballots are finally tallied at this year’s election, hundreds of thousands –

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Stanley Johnson and the trouble with Green Tories

I have a theory about intra-Johnson family politics. Some time in 2017 or 2018 Stanley agreed to shut up about his opposition to Brexit if Boris dropped his climate scepticism and threw himself wholesale into green issues. A truce between father and son certainly seemed to emerge around that time, and Boris, the man who a few years earlier had written that wind farms ‘couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding’ was reborn an environmentalist. If I am right, Boris sure kept his side of the bargain. But if so, Stanley evidently no longer feels bound to keep quiet about Brexit, or even to remain loyal to the party

Steerpike Steerpike

Full list: Which newspapers backed Labour?

They may not command the power that they once did, but newspaper endorsements are still highly-prized by political parties. Labour is trying to convince voters that they have moved on since the Corbyn era, with the backing of Fleet Street’s titles being a useful way of demonstrating this to their readers. The endorsement of the Sun this week comes after four years of effort by Keir Starmer’s to show that his party has truly changed. Facing a landslide loss, the Conservatives meanwhile are getting only semi-enthusiastic support from the Tory press. The Daily Mail for instance is advocating tactical voting for the Tories to ensure it provides an effective opposition

Alexander Horne

What would a Labour landslide mean for parliament?

As Rishi Sunak faces electoral oblivion today, his final gambit before polling day is to threaten voters with the risk of a Labour ‘super-majority’. The term ‘super-majority’ is constitutionally meaningless in the UK: in our system of government a majority of one gives a party the same right to make and unmake laws as a majority in the hundreds. But voters should care about the impact of a large Labour lead. Arguably, a Labour landslide could have a practical impact on the way parliament works. Parliament’s two core functions are making legislation and holding the government to account. The most obvious concern is the effect a landslide would have on

Gareth Roberts Gareth Roberts

The Tories: a requiem

And now the end is near. Barring a polling error of galactic proportions, we are hours away from the final nemesis of the Tory government. It is 14 years since Cameron and Clegg invited the press into the Downing Street garden to reveal that the coalition would ‘give our country the strong, stable and decisive leadership we need’.  As Rishi Sunak prepares to vacate the Downing Street premises on Friday, he will probably be looking about and having one of those moments so simply but so accurately captured by ABBA in ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’. ‘We just have to face it, this time we’re through.’ All of that groping, sacking

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

History will judge Rishi Sunak kindly

Memorably sweeping statements tripping easily from the tongue have a habit of worming their way into assumptions we make and ending up as the judgment of history. The word ‘appeasement’ rather than the decisions Neville Chamberlain actually took have consigned the name of a defensible statesman to something approaching a term of abuse. ‘Milk snatcher’ did Margaret Thatcher immense damage. The ‘winter of discontent’ has become too easy a shorthand for the coinciding of deep-seated problems which Thatcher herself approached with great caution. I believe Sunak did a sterling job getting grown-up government back on its feet after Johnson and Truss ‘Dementia tax’ was an expression critically important in the

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Biden is as big a narcissist as Trump

The dullest assertion you can make about Donald Trump is that he’s a narcissist who has no interest in the American people and only cares about himself. Competent pundits don’t waste wordage on such an over-obvious observation. Less obvious, though more so since last week’s dog’s dinner presidential debate – in the aftermath of which dubbing the encounter ‘elder abuse’ went from droll witticism to exhausted cliché in a few hours – is that Joe Biden’s narcissism rivals Trump’s and may even exceed it. The Bidens’ decision to contest this race was arrogant and criminally oblivious to the country’s future Early in his 2020 run, Biden indicated to apparatchiks in

Douglas Murray

The Tories have only themselves to blame

I was amused the other week to read George Osborne’s Diary in this magazine. In it the man now in charge of giving away the British Museum’s collection recalled something John Major said to him in 1997. This was that the Conservative party ‘will never win while we remain in thrall to the hard right of our party’. It is news that the Conservative party ever was. Really this was a warning from Osborne that the centre-left tendencies of the Conservative party must be adhered to. Though it should be noted that there is a flaw at the source: citing John Major on electoral advice is like quoting a bankrupt

Katy Balls Katy Balls

‘I have to forge my own path’: Rachel Reeves on her plans for the economy

Outside a café on the outskirts of Reading, Rachel Reeves is listening to the concerns of small-business owners. ‘Something that has affected us over the past couple of years is our relationship with Europe,’ says an attendee to nods from the others. ‘We end up not trading because it’s not worth it.’ Reeves sticks to the script that there will be no rejoining the EU (‘We’re not going to go back in, that ship has sailed’) but says that relations can be improved. The shadow chancellor is here to support the Labour candidate Yuan Yang, a former FT journalist. It’s one of the final stops on her campaign tour of

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

It’s payback time for voters

It won’t be much comfort to Rishi Sunak, but he’s not the only world leader being put to the electoral sword. Joe Biden will be lucky to survive the summer as the Democrats’ presidential nominee after his disastrous debate performance. Almost every opinion poll says he’s losing to Donald Trump. In France, Emmanuel Macron bet on a snap election, daring his country to vote for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Voters accepted that bet and are making the French President pay. This weekend we could see Jordan Bardella, 28, asked to become the next prime minister. Justin Trudeau looks doomed as Prime Minister of Canada. Around the world, leaders are

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Captain Tom’s daughter disqualified from charity

Uh oh. Amid the longstanding inquiry into Captain Sir Tom Moore’s family, one rather damning conclusion has so far been reached. It has been revealed today that Captain Tom’s daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore and her husband have been disqualified from being charity trustees as part of an ongoing investigation by the Charity Commission. Talk about a fall from grace… Interest in the Captain Tom Foundation – set up in 2020 after the army veteran fundraised £38.9 million for the NHS during lockdown – piqued after concerns arose about the management of the charity and its independence from the ex-soldier’s family. Sir Tom Moore passed away in February 2021, shortly after his

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Last YouGov election poll points to Tory wipeout

The final polls are rolling in ahead of voters going to the polls tomorrow. On Tuesday night, Survation published its last MRP poll of the campaign, suggesting the Tories could be left with a mere 64 Tory MPs – and Labour on 484. So, perhaps by comparison tonight’s YouGov poll will make for plesant reading in Conservative Campaign Headquarters. It has the Tories on their worst ever result – but still triple figures – with 102 MPs. Meanwhile, Labour win 431 seats, the Lib Dems a record 72 and Reform three seats, including Nigel Farage’s seat of Clacton. Taken together, Labour would win a majority of 212 – the biggest