All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories
Unfriendly commentators can recite insults against the Conservative party in our sleep. It is a rolling shambles, populated by backstabbing fantasists and fanatics. Conservatives are so irredeemably split they removed Boris Johnson only to find they could not unite behind a replacement. Good government is impossible when the ruling elite is composed of shifting factions
If you find yourself wondering over the next few days why it is so swelteringly hot, I have an answer for you. It’s because of rich people. It’s because of those wealthy elites with all their gas-guzzling vehicles and reckless holidaymaking. It’s their fault you’re sweating on the Tube. This infantile claim really is being
The eyes had it, in last night’s leadership debate. Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak took turns directing to the camera a puppy-eyed gaze. Tom Tugendhat blinked manfully, as if overcome from time to time with a sense of his humble desire to serve. Kemi Badenoch blinked, too – but more in the way of someone
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Isabel Hardman, James Forsyth and Katy Balls pick through tonight’s ITV debate with the five candidates for Prime Minister.
That was quite a debate. I’ve never seen senior Tory ministers and MPs lay into each other so publicly. Rishi Sunak accused Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt of being socialists – not a compliment in the Tory lexicon – for being reckless with the public finances. Truss attacked Sunak for raising taxes to record levels. Kemi Badenoch
‘If you’re still watching this debate, well done,’ said Mordaunt, bizarrely, in her closing statement. ‘I wish tonight had been less about us and more about you.’ She obviously scripted that comment before she had any idea how the evening was going to pan out and her own contributions were certainly forgettable. But the others
Good evening. The second Conservative leadership debate between Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Penny Mordaunt, Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat has just finished. Below is the full live analysis (please reload the page to get updates): 10.00 p.m. Coffee House Shots 9.00 p.m. Snap poll: the verdict Katy Balls writes… The snap poll verdict is in –
The bookies’ favourite to win the Tory leadership race, Penny Mordaunt, has had a difficult few days. She’s facing questions not just about her views on trans rights, but about how honest she is about them. Suella Braverman has come pretty close to saying that, like Boris Johnson, Mordaunt has a habit of rewriting history
In just a few days, the Conservative leadership race will be down to the final two candidates. But what happens after that is unclear. This afternoon, the ConservativeHome website released another round of polling. This time it is on how the candidates would fare against one another in the run-offs if they made it to the final
Right-wingers appear not to be terribly keen on Penny Mordaunt. Toby Young read her book Greater: Britain After the Storm and didn’t like what he found. Nor did Will Lloyd, over at UnHerd, who wrote that: ‘Mordaunt tacks to the centre, but ends up on the managerial left. What she writes sounds like it was
‘Every human life has many aspects,’ said the novelist Milan Kundera. ‘The past of each can just as easily arranged into the biography of a beloved statesman as into that of a criminal.’ Of no one has this been truer in recent days than our departing Prime Minister Boris Johnson. To read some of the
Penny Mordaunt – I’m being smeared over self-ID claims No Conservative party leadership race is ever without drama. With the first TV debate now under their belt, the five candidates are fending off scrutiny not just from the opposition and the media, but from each other. One of the biggest rifts from Friday’s debate was
Tom Tugendhat and Penny Mordaunt both took to the BBC Sunday Show this morning. Tugendhat’s appearance came straight after the chief of the defence staff Tony Radakin and Tugendhat immediately went on foreign policy his strongest suit. His answers in this area are crisper than his ones on domestic issues. Tugendhat made much, as he
Amid the noise of the Tory leadership fight, some significant comments in the papers could be missed today. Here’s the quote, from a Sunday Times interview with an intelligent, ambitious female politician in her forties: Biology is important. A woman is somebody with a biology that is different from a man’s biology. We’re seeing in sport
Watching the Conservative leadership race from across the sea in America has left me both hopeful and envious. Hopeful that the Tories will select a leader who will steer Britain to a better, stronger place, and exhibit responsible global leadership to offset the void left and damage done by our catastrophe-in chief, Joe Biden. In
Launching her campaign for party leader and prime minister, Liz Truss said something that barely registered amid the big tax-cutting promises, but made me prick up my ears in a very positive way. She talked about trying to make sure that parents and other carers were not penalised by taking time out of paid work.
It’s been a mixed performance thus far for the ‘Liz for leader’ brigade. A flawless campaign launch, strong cabinet support and enthusiastic media backing have all been positives but the failure to lock up the votes of the Tory right have left the Foreign Secretary in a less confident situation than she might otherwise have
Economic growth in China is grinding to a halt. The days of soaring double-digit growth are over, and the malaise facing the country’s spluttering economy goes far deeper than the hit from Covid-19 lockdowns. Gross domestic product in the April to June quarter grew by a paltry 0.4 per cent from a year earlier, according
Ask any Labour politician which of the Conservative leadership candidates they fear most and they will most likely say: none of them. That is largely hubris, because Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the likeliest candidates to become Britain’s next Prime Minister, pose different threats to Labour’s opinion poll lead. Ideally, Labour would like
Conservative leadership elections aren’t usually associated with big policy ideas. But last week Kemi Badenoch put forward a proposal that could revolutionise the way the British state works. She suggested we should break up the most powerful government department, the Treasury. Others also think there’s a problem; Penny Mordaunt’s book Greater: Britain After The Storm
While Tom Tugendhat won the public opinion poll after last night’s debate, this is a race that will be decided by Tory members – and they seem to have a new winner (for now at least). A new ConservativeHome poll has seen Penny Mordaunt knocked off the top spot by Kemi Badenoch – who now
Watching the Channel 4 leadership debate last night was thoroughly depressing. If only Boris Johnson’s premiership hadn’t ended in the way it did – a surreal version of the famous butterfly effect where one man gropes another in the Carlton Club and the leader of a nuclear power gets the boot. Without Boris there seems
As the reputation of Westminster sinks ever lower and our elected masters seem able to do even less, candidates for political office seek outside areas by which they can bolster their credentials. Once it might have been the Church: now it’s often business. But one evergreen way of commanding instant respect in Tory circles is
Last night Channel 4 held a 90-minute live event starring Rishi, Liz, Tom, Penny and Kemi. Not a manufactured pop-band but the candidates for the Tory leadership. The first question was easy-peasy. ‘Is Boris Johnson honest?’ ‘No,’ the obvious answer, was beyond them. They ducked and weaved and dodged and fudged. Except for Tom Tugendhat.
Angela Rayner caused a bit of a stir a few weeks ago when she rocked up at the Glyndebourne opera festival. The stiletto-sporting socialist made much capital out of her trip after Dominic Raab mocked her for picking a Mozart opera over the RMT picket line, enabling her to pose as a victim of Tory
‘We’re all Keynesians now,’ Richard Nixon reportedly said in 1971 before ushering in a decade of high inflation. In the twilight of his premiership, Boris Johnson’s chief political legacy to the Conservative party is likely to be cakeism – the political philosophy that denies the existence of trade-offs and asserts you can have it all.
You’ve probably heard the joke about the two hikers facing an angry bear. One changes into his running shoes, telling his confused friend: ‘I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you.’ The gag captures the importance of differentiating between the relative and the absolute. Knowing that a tree is taller
As the Tory party leadership race enters its next stage this weekend, one thing is becoming very clear: the two candidates that MPs will select for party members to vote on may not be the people that, if it was up to them, the grassroots members would pick themselves. The yawning gulf between Westminster and
OK, it might sound a little fanciful, but hear me out. I think there could just be a way for Boris to scrape back in to power. Some Johnson loyalists in Westminster think that whoever replaces him will implode, that there could be another leadership race before the 2024 election and that Boris could run and
Enid Blyton made a lot of money out of the Famous Five. Maybe she could have invented a brand called the ‘Infamous Five’ that would have made her even more. But the Unfamous Five is a name that might have struggled to bear box office fruit. Yet the glories of the British constitution are about
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In the first televised Tory leadership debate, the five remaining candidates set out their stalls on trust in politics, tax cuts and the NHS ahead of the next round of voting on Monday. How did each candidate fare tonight? Katy Balls speaks to Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth.
40 min listen
Freddy Gray speaks to Geoff Shullenberger, a lecturer at New York University and columnist for Compact Magazine about a range of topics, from the ideas and appeal of philosopher René Girard to transhumanism and transgenderism, and the war in Ukraine.
On Friday night the Tory leadership candidates faced-off in the first televised debate of the contest, hosted on Channel 4. The five contenders – Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt, Liz Truss, Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat – set out their stalls on trust in politics, tax cuts and the NHS ahead of the next round of voting on Monday.
As the Tory leadership candidates prepare for tonight’s debate on Channel 4, I find my mind turning back to the Cleggmania that followed Britain’s first televised election debate. As I say in the Times today, Penny Mordaunt’s current momentum feels a bit like things did in 2010: a previously little known politician is shooting to prominence. Only 16 per cent
