All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Can Labour’s links with trade unions survive the leadership contest? This morning, Harriet Harman will outline in a speech at Labour HQ how the new party leader will be elected — and she will say the unions won’t be deciding who it is: ‘We will have strict rules to ensure there is a level playing
From ‘News of the Week‘, The Spectator, 22 May 1915: We have named a Dictator to finish the war. The Dictatorship, it is true, is in commission, but none the less it is a Dictatorship. The new National Government will be all-powerful. Let us hasten to say that this will not make their task or
Forget the riveting excitement of the Labour leadership contest, Westminster was shut down on Sunday night for a different type of race. As part of filming for the new James Bond film Spectre, an extensive helicopter and speed boat chase took place along the Thames. Bond and a mystery blonde sped along the river from
Andy Burnham may be the trade unions’ favourite candidate for Labour leader but he is already distancing himself from some of Ed Miliband’s worst populist nonsense. This is what he said in today’s Observer: ‘We have got to get away from things that look like symbolism. I am going to put the mansion tax in
Michael Gove has been keeping a relatively low profile since being made Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor last weekend. I understand that he is keen to master the brief, and particularly the complexities around the creation of a British Bill of Rights, before he starts hitting the TV studios. But an address he gave to
“I’m the change candidate,” said Andy Burnham, settling down to the consolidation phase of his leadership bid. Chuka Umunna is out, so he is now the bookies’ favourite. He faces a conundrum: the brains of Labour want to tack to the centre, the money (ie, the unions) want to keep it to the left. So
Ukip’s internal warfare continues today with interventions from both sides. Suzanne Evans, the party’s deputy chairman, appeared on the Andrew Marr Show this morning to play down the tensions. She told Andrew Marr that the situation has been overegged: ‘I don’t think anyone hates anyone, I genuinely don’t. I think we’ve had some problems with some advisers
During this election, every newspaper endorsed the party that most of their readers support – with two exceptions. The Independent and the Evening Standard, who have left-leaning readerships, both backed the Tories (in the Indy’s case, the coalition). A bold decision for the proprietor, Evgeny Lebedev, given that the endorsement divided readers and staff alike.
From ‘German outrages in Belgium‘, The Spectator, 15 May 1915: TOWARDS the end of last year the Prime Minister appointed a Committee to inquire into the outrages committed by German troops during the present war, and the Report of the Committee was issued on Wednesday. As the Committee indicate, the inference to be drawn is
From ‘Standing at Ease‘, The Spectator, 15 May 1915: It is a contradiction in terms, but we think it is true to experience, to say that certain people in distress never stand at ease but when they are working hard. They are as a rule people of very strong will. “Attention!” they shout at their own
George Osborne has moved to strengthen his personal, political operation by hiring the political editor of the Daily Mail James Chapman as his director of communications. This beefing up of his media team will be seen in Westminster as a statement of political intent by the Chancellor; it gives him a more formidable operation than
Jim Murphy is quitting Scottish Labour. After only narrowly surviving a vote of no confidence from the party’s executive this morning, Murphy announced that after a ‘terrible election defeat’, he will still tender his resignation in a month’s time. As well as acknowledging Scottish Labour’s terrible performance in the general election, Murphy opened both barrels
Just when Mr S thought it was safe to go to his local watering hole now the 56 Scottish SNP MPs have chosen Parliament’s sports and social as their pub of choice, it turns out that the SNP invasion has gone global. Word reaches Steerpike that the presence of the Scottish Nationalists cannot be escaped even outside of the UK. In
Nigel Farage said today his critics need to put up or shut up and Douglas Carswell has chosen the former. Confirming that he is the ‘senior figure’ Farage mentioned earlier, the Clacton MP has written an op-ed in the Times tomorrow calling for a change in direction. He says that ‘Ukip has arrived — and
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
Lord Ashcroft has likened the current state of the polling industry with that of the Liberal Democrats, but he could quite have easily chosen the Labour party as a comparison. All are in the post-mortem stage: pondering how they got the election so wrong and desperately searching for the path back to public credibility. More
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
It has been alleged that Nigel Farage never formally resigned from Ukip as part of what party sources have told the Spectator was a stitch up to avoid a leadership contest. It is claimed that the Ukip leader never wrote a letter to the party’s chairman tendering his resignation. He told the media on Friday
The Ukip wars have taken another casualty: the party’s head of communications Paul ‘Gobby’ Lambert. Guido reports that the ‘press office has declared war on the leader’ and it appears Lambert is a casualty of the fighting. Lambert was brought in from the BBC last year to run the party’s media operation but there have
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
All this talk from Labour and the Liberal Democrats about who will be their next party leader appears to have got to the Tory camp. Although the dust is yet to settle following David Cameron’s surprise Conservative majority in the election, Mensch couldn’t help but offer her prediction for who the next Tory Prime Minister will be, when
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
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
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
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
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
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?