All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
I’ve been on the campaign trail in Scotland, and was struck by how often education was raised by voters – underlining a trend of the SNP’s domestic record catching up with Nicola Sturgeon. She had come prepared for her interview with Andrew Neil on this point, but how reliable were her answers? Ms Sturgeon’s tactic is to
Did you see the TV debate last night? I have to say I thought Jeremy was an impressive performer and a tough adversary. Well-prepared. On top of his brief. Knew the policy inside out. Persistent to the last, he never gave up. Yes, Jeremy Paxman definitely still has it. The strange thing about general election campaigns
Jeremy Corbyn must be furious about his interview with Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour. Not because of the contents of that interview, because presumably he doesn’t mind people thinking he doesn’t have a clue how he’d fund his promise of state-provided childcare. After all, if he thought stuff like that was important, he’d have taken 30
‘When the facts change, I change my mind,’ John Maynard Keynes is (wrongly) claimed to have said. Whatever the origin of the quote, Theresa May seems to be taking it to heart – and, as a floating voter, I’m delighted. But it seems there aren’t many who share that view, given that May’s shifting stance on certain
So who came off worse in The Battle for Number 10, last night’s Channel 4 / Sky stand-off between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn? It was Jeremy Paxman. May and Corbyn were paragons of patience and sense in contrast with this oafish, boorish barker of rude and even pointless questions. Watching Paxo was squirm-inducing. He’s
There are three supermarkets in the small market town where I live. That’s three major chains serving just 14,000 people, not to mention another five within a four-mile radius. So when Sainsbury’s lodged planning permission to build a fourth outlet within spitting distance of the existing shops, local people had had enough. Objections were launched
We learn this morning that MI5 has launched an internal inquiry into how they didn’t catch Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber. He was reported to them five times, apparently, even by his imam – the spooks looked into him, but after a while discontinued their investigation. Perhaps we will learn that there has been an
I suppose that if you are under thirty, Northern Ireland seems a place far away and it must be difficult to imagine a time when news from the province was a regular feature of the BBC and ITV nightly news bulletins. The Good Friday Agreement, for all its imperfections and awkward compromises, settled something that now
Angela Merkel has never been a showboating politician. Public speaking isn’t her forte – she prefers to work behind the scenes. That’s why her latest speech has made such big waves, on both sides of the Atlantic. The Washington Post said it marked the beginning of a ‘new chapter in US-European relations.’ The New York
Paul Nuttall doesn’t want to be a hangman after all. There was some doubt over the weekend when the Ukip leader said he’d bring back the death penalty and would even pull the lever himself. This left Andrew Neil somewhat curious and so he used his election interview to enquire if Nuttall had been signalling a
It hardly seems possible – where does the time go? – but the general election takes place next week. Following the suspension of electioneering after the atrocity in Manchester, the political parties have returned to the campaign trail with all kinds of promises designed to lure the electorate to their respective sides. As far as personal
Oh dear. Jeremy Corbyn put in his best media performance of the campaign last night. But things have taken a turn for the worse this morning. Jez popped up on Woman’s Hour to unveil the party’s plans to give free childcare to parents. The only problem? Corbyn had no idea how much it would cost.
Jeremy Corbyn defied his critics by coming across well during last night’s debate and Labour is continuing to enjoy a revival in the polls. But the Labour leader is still facing a tough time in the press: Take a look in the small print of Labour’s plan for government, says the Daily Mail, and there’s
A week ago, in the immediate aftermath of the Manchester bombing, it would have been impossible to imagine that Jeremy Corbyn, rather than Theresa May, might benefit most from the interruption in the campaign. Corbyn is supposed to be weak on security and vulnerable to his terrorist-supporting past. Meanwhile, May stood to gain from the
The ongoing argument about Jeremy Corbyn’s support for the ‘armed struggle’ of the Provisional IRA is vacuous and circular. Very few people endorse every single action of any group they support, but Corbyn and his circle were always there to lend their support, particularly when the Provisionals were in difficulty. There are thousands of Labour
Jeremy Corbyn turned in one of his most assured media performances in the Sky / Channel 4 ‘Battle for Number 10’ programme. Answering questions from the audience, Corbyn was confident and kept his temper under some hostile questioning. He took every opportunity to return to his key messages. He framed them in a reasonable, rather
Tonight there will be sighs of relief in CCHQ after Theresa May put in a solid – if imperfect – performance in the Sky / Channel 4 ‘Battle for Number 10’ programme. After a difficult week which saw the Tory lead drop to five points, the Prime Minister navigated her way through a range of tricky topics from her
If Ukip’s vote really does hit the floor come June 8th, the party’s leader won’t be granted a coveted prime-time slot on BBC One to make their mark. Thanks to Ukip’s past success, Paul Nuttall did get that opportunity tonight. But the Ukip leader’s plan did not fare well for coming under the scrutiny of
Although Theresa May has refused to go head-to-head with Jeremy Corbyn in a debate ahead of the election, Boris Johnson and Andrew Gwynne have at least obliged. Ahead of tonight’s Sky News/Channel 4 leaders interviews, the two came close to coming to fisticuffs as they went blow-to-blow over the election. While Labour’s joint national elections
At one of Lord Ashcroft’s focus groups recently, participants were asked what jobs they thought might suit politicians if they were not, well, politicians. In Edinburgh, one respondent unkindly suggested Nicola Sturgeon would make an excellent traffic warden. For her part poor Kezia Dugdale – I’m afraid ‘Poor Kezia Dugdale’ has become the accepted form
AN: Paul Nuttall UKIP was established in 1993, it was to get the UK out of the European Union. You won the referendum, your side, last year. So instead of enduring this agonising decline in UKIP why not just declare victory and go home? PN: Well, we did win. As you said, we were set
The most memorable poster of the 2015 general election campaign was an image of Alex Salmond with Ed Miliband snug in his top pocket. As Adam Boulton points out today, the Tories haven’t tried to revisit that image, but Nicola Sturgeon might have helped them along. She expects Theresa May to win a majority, she
No-one has ever accused Nicola Sturgeon of winging it. Unlike some politicians, she enjoys doing her homework. If you want to talk about the detail of policy, about the technical parameters within which this or that is measured, about the baseline assumptions that dictate funding decisions or the procedural manner in which policy is formulated,
AN: Nicola Sturgeon the SNP has governed Scotland for ten years, so can we start by agreeing that the performance of Scottish public services is the responsibility of you and the SNP government? NS: I take responsibility for the performance of our public services, although Scotland’s overall budget of course is determined by decisions taken
Given Scottish Labour’s rapid fall from grace north of the border, Mr S suspects that its leader Kezia Dugdale has grown accustomed to being on the receiving end of many choice words from the public. However, she probably wasn’t expecting Sophy Ridge’s most recent slip of the tongue. On Sky News, Ridge introduced Dugdale as the
Amber Rudd – Abedi operation is still at ‘full tilt’ In the wake of Monday’s horrific attack in Manchester, Andrew Marr interviewed the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, about what action the government was taking in the aftermath of the attack, and whether the government and security services had done enough to prevent the attack happening
With Labour beginning to gain ground in the polls, the party will be keen to keep its momentum going in the final days of the campaign. So, whichever brain at Labour HQ decided it was a good idea to send Diane Abbott onto the Andrew Marr show has some explaining to do. Explaining her credentials
The latest challenge was to supply a poem that takes as its first line W.S. Gilbert’s ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one’ but replaces ‘policeman’ with another trade or profession. Although this line doesn’t come until line eight in Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘Policeman’s Song’, it was the opening I prescribed and so it
Where’s all the unpredictability in politics gone? After the hubbub about a ‘crisis of liberalism’ and the thrills of punting on Trump and Brexit, election betting in 2017 is beginning to look almost boring. Everybody who wasn’t crazy — or excessively paranoid about the return of fascism — knew that Emmanuel Macron would beat Marine
My father worked as a fire warden during the Blitz, trying to contain the damage done by the Luftwaffe, and he witnessed more death and devastation than most soldiers saw on the frontline. Over a million houses in London were destroyed and nearly 20,000 civilians killed. But the horrors of the night were made more
Perhaps we’re now past the moment of shock. Certainly we’ve moved fairly swiftly past the other stages of post-massacre grief. With the departure of Katie Hopkins from LBC it is good to see that Monday night’s attack in Manchester has not gone completely unpunished. The desire to point fingers and scapegoat is a perfectly normal
The news that the Tory lead has dropped to just five points, according to a Times/YouGov poll yesterday, has been dismissed in some quarters as an exception to the polls, rather than the rule. However, even if you don’t buy that the Tory lead over Labour is now at its lowest since Theresa May came to power, it
We learned something important from Jeremy Corbyn’s interview with Andrew Neil: The Labour leader wants to be Prime Minister and will do whatever it takes. His soppier critics often announce their sympathy for a man who would be much happier on the backbenches. Do not believe a word of it. Listen instead to what he told the BBC
Jeremy Corbyn and his crowd always blame Britain first, I argue in The Sun today. They view the West as being responsible for the world’s ills. It was this worldview that led Corbyn to say in his first speech since the Manchester attack that British foreign policy increases the risk of terrorism at home. Now,
