All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Anxious viewers tuned into Question Time last night to watch live coverage of the ongoing Nigel Farage crisis. Quite a week for the Ukip leader. Up and down. In and out. And back in again. His pitch for a Westminster power-base imploded on election day. And he promptly quit, as promised. But his resignation fared no
With Chuka Umunna out, the choice for Labour party members is simple. If they want to win the next election they will choose Liz Kendall as their next leader. There is a very simple test for suitability for the job: their reply to the question ‘did the last Labour government spend too much money?’ Kendall
Nigel Farage’s fight back has continued with an interview on Sky News this morning. Following on from his appearance on Question Time, the Ukip leader described an ‘astonishing’ level of support for him within the party. But he admitted that there is someone high up within the party trying to cause trouble or oust him as leader: ‘I
With 190 women elected last week and the number of ethnic minority MPs hitting record levels, Parliament is slowly beginning to look a little bit like modern Britain. Settling in, one male MP, proudly wearing a green new members’ badge, was sitting on the Terrace on his first night in the Commons. He proceeded to
David Cameron still has much to learn about dealing with nationalists. Theirs is a very different kind of politics – one where flags, language and choreography matters. Nicola Sturgeon is hawking a false premise: l’Ecosse c’est moi. That Scotland is her country, that David Cameron can visit (as he does today) in the same way
The row over what to do with its Short money was the tinderbox for Ukip’s internal tensions. Although the war between Team Farage and Team O’Flynn has been bubbling away for months, the question of what to do with the £650,000 of public funds, combined with Nigel Farage’s un-resignation, kicked off a briefing war that brought these fights
Chuka Umunna has surprised many today with the news that he has withdrawn from the race for the Labour leadership. Explaining his decision he said that the ‘added level of pressure’ had not been a ‘comfortable experience’. Mr S can already hear the sighs from the many Chuka supporters who had seen him as the man to
The Boston bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was today sentenced to death by lethal injection. The jury reached the decision in the city where the killer, 19 at the time, blew up the marathon, killing three and injuring 260. I feel no sympathy for him, but nor do I support the death penalty and I’m constantly amazed by
I have more and more time for Simon Cowell. On Britain’s Got Talent on Saturday night he was dishing out his hard-faced reality check to the parade of wannabes who as usual range from silly asses through competent-karaoke to on-the-money in Sycospeak. I also admire the wily care for words with which he crafts his
You know, I’m not sure the new, in-by-a-squeak Tory MP for Croydon, Gavin Barwell, has quite got it right when he says that ‘London is turning into Paris’, what with the rich dominating the centre and the poor pushed to the suburbs. If only. Obviously, it’s true that there’s a species of social cleansing going
In this View from 22 special podcast, Fraser Nelson and Sebastian Payne discuss the ongoing Ukip wars with Laura Pitel from The Times. Can Nigel Farage survive as leader? Is there still a conflict between Team Farage and other tribes within the party? And what role has Douglas Carswell played, if any, in the briefing wars? You can
In the past few minutes, Chuka Umunna has announced he is not standing for the Labour leadership after all, citing ‘pressure’ that he found uncomfortable. This is odd, although Friday is the day when Sunday journalists get to work on big stories, and Umunna may have got wind of something that he felt was particularly
This week, The Guardian informed us, a study revealed the ‘scale of the British public’s denial about weight problems’. Data collected by the Association for the Study of Obesity found that ‘more than a fifth of Britons who think their size is healthy or normal were in fact overweight’. This apparent delusion has been attributed
Ed Milband and his team were not ready for their major defeat on election night. On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Dan Hodges discusses the final days of Miliband’s leadership with Andrew Harrop of the Fabian Society. What were the majority mistakes of the Labour campaign? Was vital polling information about his seat kept
The chaos in Ukip and the Labour leadership race has allowed Number 10 to quietly finish off the task of constructing a new government without too much attention. The distribution of ministerial posts has gone down as well as can be expected. Enough people have been brought back and rebels brought in to give most
In the midst of a glorious election night for the Conservatives on 7 May, London stubbornly resisted the swing across the rest of the country and went a darker shade of red. Why is that and why does it matter when overall we have a majority Conservative government for the first time in 18 years?
It is touch and go whether Nigel Farage can survive as Ukip leader. With key figures such as former leader Roger Knapman, donor Stuart Wheeler and treasurer Hugh Williams saying it’s time for a change, the operation to ‘save’ Farage has begun in haste. Ukip’s deputy leader Paul Nuttall, who is seen as Farage’s anointed
Raheem Kassam, senior adviser to Nigel Farage, has not been ‘sacked’ from Ukip after all. It was reported earlier this afternoon that he had left the party today — as Patrick O’Flynn appeared to be asking for. But the party is being careful with its language. The party’s press office are simply saying: ‘Raheem Kassam is
Tonight at midnight, something will change in Parliament. All the MPs who lost their seats in last week’s elections will have their passes cancelled, to be replaced by a pass giving them more limited access to the Parliamentary estate. They’ve been sneaking through Westminster over the past few days to clear out their offices and
Labour is in a more difficult position now than it was after its defeat in 1992. In ’92, the electorate had sent Labour a clear message: move to the centre, don’t say you’ll put up taxes and get a better leader. But this time round, the message Labour has been sent is more complicated. There
Although Labour’s celebrity endorsements from Martin Freeman, Robert Webb and Russell Brand did little to help the party in the election, Norman Lamb will be hoping his new backer will help him win the Liberal Democrats leadership contest. Dappy, the N-Dubz singer, has come out as backing Lamb to be the next leader of the Liberal Democrats:
Now that we can’t brace ourselves for the SNP ruling over Westminster and the Labour party as we’d been warned (though they still seem to be having a bit of fun), the House of Lords has become the location of potential uprisings against the Tory government. The bulk of Lib Dem and Labour peers, along
This article was first published in The Spectator on 9 October, 1959. I am a totally non-political animal. I prefer the name of the Liberal Party to the name of any other and I vote Conservative rather than Labour, mainly because the Conservatives have bigger bottoms and I believe that big bottoms make for better government
Patrick O’Flynn has surfaced to explain his remarks about Nigel Farage and the team around him. On Sky News, O’Flynn denied he was gunning for Farage’s position, describing him as ‘my political hero’, but blamed a ‘couple of people in his inner circle’ who he said are ‘wrong ‘uns’: ‘The advisers he’s got around him
That some Tory MPs wouldn’t like the idea of Michael Gove scrapping the Human Rights Act has been known for some time, but there is something else worth keeping an eye out for in the next few weeks as the Tories draw up their proposals. Some Conservatives, like Dominic Grieve, have long been opposed to
The reasons why England and Wales voted so convincingly for a Conservative Government on Thursday will be debated forever, but one of the most obvious is the complete rejection of both Labour and Liberal Democrats in any constituency that has a hint of the countryside about it. This is graphically illustrated by the post-election constituency
The briefing war inside Ukip continues with the Nigel Farage camp hitting back at Patrick O’Flynn, after his remarks in the Times today. The battle is between two sides: those who are close to and work for Nigel Farage, and others in the party who are concerned about who the Ukip leader is listening to. Team Farage
Ukip is doing a very good job of convincing voters it is not a serious party. After days of shadowboxing over the use of Short money to fund the party in Westminster, its economic spokesman Patrick O”Flynn has broken cover to attack Nigel Farage — and he certainly isn’t holding back. In today’s Times, O’Flynn says the
The Stepford Student website is full of interesting articles on current affairs. For instance ‘I couldn’t give a single flying shit about electoral reform’ by Nathan Akehurst and ‘Vote for whoever the fuck you want’ by Edgar Sait-Jones. There’s something for everyone. ‘Tim Lott’s annoying but Rod Liddle is a fuckbadger’ by Ruby Lott-Lavigna, would, I am sure, amuse Rod. Tim Lott might be
‘Bank of England says that migrants are holding down wages’ the headlines screamed this morning. Yet Mark Carney, when interviewed on the Today programme this morning, spun a slightly different story. Migrants bear some responsibility for downwards pressure on wages, he said, but not so much as another group of people: British workers in the
I keep on reading that the ‘Outers’ are going to lose the upcoming EU referendum because Euroscepticism has become associated with Ukip, and Nigel Farage is too divisive. It has been talked about for some time but I’ve seen it far more since the party won 13 per cent of the vote last week. The paradox
A Telegraph journalist, Lucy Denyer, has written about how rubbish it is that people are calling their children stupid, made-up names. (Spoiler alert: I’m anti stupid made-up names.) Trouble is, while she hasn’t exactly gone the Fifi Trixibelle/Peaches route herself, she has called her son Atticus. And no, it’s not the friend of Cicero she had
The age of enlightenment was a beautiful thing. People cast aside dogma and authority. They started to think for themselves. Natural science flourished. Understanding of the natural world increased. The hegemony of religion slowly declined. Eventually real universities were created and real democracy developed. The modern world was born. People like Francis Bacon, Voltaire and
Still inside that bubble, David Aaronovitch informs us that, regardless of the election result, we are all of a metrosexual mindset, whatever that is. Like it or not, the country as a whole is becoming ‘more like’ London. This was written in response to the slings and arrows flung at Labour for neglecting its northern,