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Perhaps the past seven chaotic weeks are best regarded as an experiment by the Tories. Boris Johnson’s intention appears to be to establish just how badly he can run the country while remaining on course for re-election. Despite calamity after calamity hitting Boris’s administration, things are still looking rosy for the party: Politico‘s poll of polls shows that we are basically back where we were this time last year – at pretty much level-pegging between the Conservatives and Labour. There is no sign of the kind of positive surge in support for the opposition that would indicate the electorate is considering putting it into power.  A year ago – on 24 November, 2020

Sir Keir Starmer has become accustomed to Labour in-fighting since he became leader 18 months ago. But as the former DPP battles to drag his party into some kind of vaguely electable shape, has he been neglecting matters closer to home? For in northwest London, on Keir Starmer’s doorstep, a vicious party battle has broken out involving smears, lies and a case of mistaken identity, all splashed across the pages of the Labour leader’s local newspaper. The Camden New Journal – on which Sir Keir has spent more than £3,500 in adverts since April 2020 – has been breathlessly reporting this past fortnight all the twists and turns of some vicious skulduggery plaguing

Number 10 will have been relieved that the weekend did not bring new stories about Conservative MPs raking in lots of money from second jobs. There were still sleaze angles in the Sunday papers, including regarding the Prime Minister’s own dealings, but the air seems to be going out of the story a little. The past two weeks has opened up a chasm between the ‘red wall’ MPs elected in 2019 and more traditional Tories The trouble is that this week brings a whole host of new chances for the row to blow up once again. There’s the Liaison Committee hearing with the Prime Minister on Wednesday, which will include

Last week, Intelligence Squared put on a debate called ‘Is Labour unelectable?’ Unsurprisingly, Labour MP Jess Phillips spoke against the motion – yet in doing so she managed to prove exactly why Labour are in fact hopelessly sunk. The key moment was when Spiked’s Ella Whelan challenged Phillips for having quote tweeted and then promptly deleted an article that was supportive of Kathleen Stock, the philosophy professor hounded out of her job for her audacious view that women deserve some of their own spaces.  ‘This is worth a read. Thoughtful and gentle,’ said Phillips on Twitter, though apparently she quickly decided it wasn’t worth a read and removed the tweet. Some

Oh dear. Poor Keir Starmer has tested positive for Covid meaning he has to miss today’s Budget. Unlike Boris, he has managed to avoid getting ill until now but it’s the fifth time he has been forced to self-isolate after four previous incidents. Starmer’s absence means that shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves will be forced to step in to deliver the response to Rishi Sunak’s speech, while Prime Ministers’ Questions will be fronted by Ed Miliband. Ahead of COP26, it looks like Labour intend to show their eco-credentials by recycling their old leaders too… On the Tory side, a different Covid row dominates: the ongoing saga about masks. The Leader of the

Boris Johnson announced this afternoon that Southend will receive city status as a tribute to the campaigning work of Sir David Amess, who was killed. Sir David’s best known Commons contributing was Inserting Southend’s bid to become a city into any question, no matter how tenuous, and it seemed an inevitable way of the government marking his death. MPs paying their respects to the Southend West MP have all focused on his dedication to his constituency, but also on his kindness. Johnson told the chamber that ‘he was… one of the nicest, kindest, and most gentle individuals ever to grace these benches’. Everyone mentioned his smile and his sense of humour. The way

Sir David Amess was killed in the line of duty. He was doing one of the most important – and vulnerable – parts of an MP’s job, and he was killed while doing it. Most of the week, MPs go to work in a palace under armed guard. They live in houses with CCTV, panic alarms and rapid police response mechanisms in case of trouble. These measures have gradually been added to their lives as the perceived threat has increased. But in just over a decade, three serious attacks against MPs have taken place in the one place where they lack such security: their constituency surgeries. Stephen Timms was stabbed

The name of Mike Hill doesn’t count for much in Labour circles these days. The former MP for Hartlepool was forced to quit the Commons in March after breaching Parliament’s sexual misconduct policy, triggering a by-election which saw the Tories take the seat for the first time since 1959.  Then four months later he was reported to be facing a possible criminal inquiry after an employment tribunal ruled that he repeatedly sexually assaulted and harassed a parliamentary staff member before victimising her when she refused his advances. Now there’s one final sting in the tail for Hill’s long-suffering constituents. A bill for £6,000 for ‘bought-in services’ from Hudgell Solicitors has just been published by IPSA, which regulates MPs expense

Carole Vincent briefly became the unexpected poster girl of Labour’s remaining Corbynites when she heckled Keir Starmer during his leader’s speech. For her pains, Vincent’s voice was drowned out when many (but not all) in the conference hall stood to applaud Starmer and show their support for him: she even gave the Labour leader the chance to declare that while she and others were shouting slogans, he wanted to change Britain. The Labour activist was later interviewed and outlined her beef with Starmer, one shared by many of those who like her swelled Labour’s ranks during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Starmer, she said, should do more to challenge the government, promise

There is relief in the opposition leader’s office this morning following a broadly warm reception to Keir Starmer’s speech at Labour conference. An Opinium poll found that when chunks of the speech were surveyed on a group of 1,330 people, 63 per cent agreed with what he had to say and 62 per cent said he was competent. The front pages, too, are encouraging for Starmer with the papers focussing in on his effort to separate himself from Corbynism and learn from the Blair years. The Mirror has hailed it as one step ‘closer to power’, the Times says he made a ‘reasonable fist’ of it while the Sun has blasted

Sir Keir stamped the Labour conference with his personality today. And the mark he left was very bland, vague and colourless – but hard to dislike. Mum and Dad featured prominently. Sir Keir treats his parents like a couple of pet hedgehogs whose habits still amuse him as he looks back on his childhood. His father, a busy tool-maker, liked to toil over his instruments and to dispense wisdom at the kitchen table.  His mother was a hard-working nurse whose career was curtailed by a debilitating illness. He described her sprawling helplessly in intensive care – ‘Mum’s bed a riot of tubes’ – while four nurses strove to keep her

It’s been a bruising few days for Keir Starmer at Labour conference. The Labour leader has had to deal with internal warfare and in the process lost a member of his shadow cabinet. Tomorrow, Starmer will attempt to move past the turbulence of the last 48 hours and set out his vision to the public. Given that this will be Starmer’s first conference speech in front of the membership (the last conference was remote due to Covid restrictions), it is a test for his authority and his ability to connect both with his party and the public. Starmer’s team are in an upbeat mood – they believe they have won

Andy McDonald has resigned from Labour’s shadow cabinet after Keir Starmer refused to back raising the Minimum Wage to £15 an hour. In his resignation letter, he writes:  ‘Yesterday, your office instructed me to go into a meeting to argue against a National Minimum Wage of £15 an hour and against Statutory Sick Pay at the Living Wage. This is something I could not do.’ More damagingly, he adds:  Starmer has set great store by trying to keep the Labour party together. ‘I joined your frontbench team on the basis of the pledges that you made in the leadership campaign to bring about unity within the party and maintainability our

Keir Starmer this evening managed to scrape through his reforms to how Labour elects its leader. The victory follows a very passionate debate at the party’s conference over the policy, which will raise the qualifying threshold of support from MPs in leadership elections from 10 per cent to 20 per cent. It also drops registered supporters, who could join by paying just £3, from being able to vote in leadership elections and introduces a cut-off date for membership when a contest begins. The idea is that when there is a new leadership contest after Starmer, Labour won’t end up electing a fringe candidate. In other words, it is designed to stop

Labour can win the next election. The winds that blew apart their electoral coalition in 2019 can change in their favour; Brexit has destroyed old certainties but also made anything possible. The party needs first to analyse honestly what went wrong and then conjure up a new, yet old-fashioned progressivism to fix it. The most popular narrative is that Labour was undone by a mix of Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit: Corbyn was too radical and inept; Brexit drove the patriotic working-class into the arms of BoJo and the populist Right.  At this week’s conference, this story will be endorsed by several factions. The small Blue Labour tendency, which argues that

Keir Starmer is a keen amateur footballer. It’s one of the few facts anyone knows about the Labour leader. He enjoys a game on his spare time, and on the campaign trail too. One person who played with him recently told me: ‘You can tell he plays a lot and takes it very seriously.’ What they couldn’t say was that he was very good at it. Starmer is currently trying to play a political game by changing the rules for Labour’s leadership elections. It’s a big and serious move as it would make it harder for the party to go left when it picks his successor. It is therefore a

Many years ago, a tabloid newspaper played an unkind prank on the author of a very long and much talked-about literary novel. They sent a reporter to various bookshops to place a slip of paper into copies of the book 50 pages or so from the end. The slip said that if you phoned a particular phone number, the newspaper would pay you a fiver. Gleefully, some weeks later, they reported that nobody had telephoned to collect their prize – from which they deduced that despite its sales figures, practically nobody was actually reading the book to the end. About halfway through reading Keir Starmer’s new pamphlet for the Fabian