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My infinitesimally small claim to fame in the UK’s upcoming elections is that the prime minister once called me McVeigh, as in ‘Timothy McVeigh.’ The year was 2001. I was a college student looking to pay the bills with punditry dollars and pounds. Boris Johnson was a sitting Member of Parliament for Henley and the
Nigel Farage says his decision not to run in Tory-held seats, but to contest Labour ones, eliminates the risk that there will be another referendum to decide whether we quit the EU. This is nonsense. It is helpful to Boris Johnson – who like Farage sees a referendum as pure poison – that the Brexit
No one has much certainty about what sort of government we will end up with after this election. Even when they are being totally honest in private, neither of the two main parties will really say they’re confident they can get a majority. The Tories hope they have a good chance of getting a decent
While launching her campaign to be returned as MP for North West Durham, Laura Pidcock revealed the barmy self-righteousness that has taken over the Labour party. This is how she wrapped up her speech: ‘I know it has been a long time coming, but we are on the path to justice. And because people know
It would obviously have been better for the Tories if Nigel Farage had announced that the Brexit party was standing down everywhere. As Katy Balls says, even now, his party is standing in those very Labour held marginals that the Tories need to win a majority. But I still think today’s Brexit party announcement has increased
Nigel Farage says his party will stand aside in all 317 seats the Tories won in 2017. This drastic u-turn in the Brexit party election strategy had been expected. But it still strikes me as a poorly thought through plan, given that it means the Brexit party will give a free pass to Brexit rebels like
Will a Leave alliance lead the Tories to victory in the snap election? Nigel Farage has today announced that the Brexit party will be unilaterally creating one. The Brexit party leader rowed back on an earlier plan to stand candidates in 600 seats. Instead, the Brexit party will focus its efforts on Labour-held seats. Speaking
We were about to crash out of the EU without a deal. The political system was in deadlock. Businesses were fleeing the country and investment was drying up, all against a backdrop of global trade wars and slumping demand across the eurozone. And what happened to the British economy against all those headwinds? As we
Andrew Marr was joined this morning by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Conservatives have published a document which they claim represents the ‘eyewatering’ cost of Labour’s policies should the party win the general election, with the overall figure estimated at £1.2 trillion. Marr challenged the figures, claiming that Conservatives were relying on ‘bogus accounting’.
In one of Boris Johnson’s opening salvoes of the 2019 campaign he said of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party: ‘they detest the profit motive so viscerally…they point their fingers at individuals with a relish and a vindictiveness not seen since Stalin persecuted the kulaks.’ Boris Johnson is no Winston Churchill. But in making that claim, the
Dear Nigel Believe it or not, I’ve been your defender. I’ve often told Americans, ‘Sure, he comes across as a fop. But listen to what he actually says. He’s smarter than you think.’ OK, you have an affect problem. I’ve seen through the clowning. I bet you’ve never been that camp off-camera, and lately you’ve
The latest challenge called for a poem that begins ‘By Waterloo Station I sat down and…’. Some of you begged, some swore, others slept. But most, in a pleasingly sizable entry, took their lead from weeping Elizabeth Smart. There was a welcome influx of newcomers this week, alongside the familiar names, and the tone ranged
Wales has not been the source of good electoral tidings for the Conservatives for a very long time. The party last won a general election here in ’59 – that’s 1859. Since then, Wales has had successive lengthy eras of Liberal and then Labour dominance, with the Conservatives rarely able to mount a serious challenge.
Every election campaign has a wobble. But the Tories broke new ground in managing to wobble before they’d even launched their campaign. However, the formal start of the Tory campaign on Wednesday night does appear to have stabilised things, I say in The Sun this morning. I understand that the Tories own polling still shows
The first official week of the Conservatives’ election campaign did not go as many inside CCHQ had hoped. A cabinet minister resigned, a row erupted over insensitive Tory comments on the Grenfell fire and a candidate stepped down over previous comments on rape. Despite this, the Conservatives end the week with a sense of cautious
Home Secretary Priti Patel downgraded our national terrorism threat assessment last week from ‘severe’, where it has sat for the last four years to ‘substantial’. Attacks have now been reduced from ‘highly likely’ to ‘likely’. We’re never given the full analysis of the reasons for the changes in alert levels, which is independently assessed by
Thirty years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism is back in fashion. The anniversary is a good occasion to reflect on some of the lessons that we have collectively un-learned, or perhaps never learned properly in the first place from the fall of Communism. The division of Germany into a broadly capitalist
If you’re a regular podcast listener, you might have noticed a slight rebranding – we’ve rolled out a fresh look across our podcasts, plus, what was known as The Spectator Podcast is now The Edition. But fear not: underneath the fresh lick of paint, they’re the same podcasts that you know and love. So can
It should be a national scandal, but it isn’t. Downing Street’s decision not to release the intelligence and security committee’s report on Russia ahead of the election has generated predictable and understandable anger and confusion. Speaking in the Commons on Tuesday, Emily Thornberry asked the government what it had “to hide” by not releasing the
Nicola Sturgeon says she wants to form a “progressive alliance” after the election to evict Boris Johnson from 10 Downing Street – which in practice means an arrangement with Labour to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister (this could be a formal coalition though Sturgeon told me she would prefer a less constraining arrangement). And she
It will be a sight for sore eyes on Sunday when leaders of the two main parties lay their wreaths at the cenotaph. Prime Minister Boris Johnson leads a government that last month failed to include legislation in the Queen’s Speech to protect military veterans from prosecution; Jeremy Corbyn’s close and long associations with the IRA
Should rabbis dabble in politics? Should they use their influence to persuade their congregation to follow a certain political path? Should this authority extend to interventions in parliamentary elections and other matters of national debate? I pose these questions because in recent days British Jews has been confronted with some dramatic instances of very public
The below is an edited transcript of Ian Austin’s remarks on BBC Radio 4 Today. I only wanted to be a Labour MP. And I only ever really want to be the Labour MP for Dudley. It’s been such a huge privilege to do this job – a job I’ve loved, a place I love.
The two most important speeches to date of the election campaign have been made by the Chancellor and Shadow Chancellor, Sajid Javid and John McDonnell, and not by their respective leaders. And it is just possible these will still be the most important speeches in five weeks time, on polling day. Because they set out
When it was revealed this week that the Labour parliamentary candidate in Coventry South, Zarah Sultana, had previously said she would celebrate the deaths of Tony Blair and Benjamin Netanyahu, few would have thought to defend her comments. In fact the candidate herself apologised this week for the remarks she made in 2015. One person
How long should we remember the MPs’ expenses scandal? Should someone who used taxpayers’ money to kit out their home and renovate their swimming pool be allowed a second chance at being an MP? The imminent selection of a Conservative candidate in Sevenoaks raises such questions. Selections are politics in its most raw and spiteful
Will former Labour MPs help the Tories break the red wall? A key plank of the Tory path to a majority consists of winning seats in the Midlands and the North which have been Labour for generations. Many of these areas voted to leave in the EU referendum. The Tory hope is that a well-executed campaign in
The Labour party are not in high spirits today after their election campaign was derailed by the ex-Labour MP, Ian Austin, who this morning urged ‘decent, patriotic’ Labour voters to back Boris Johnson at the election because of Labour’s continued problems with anti-Semitism. Deeply unhappy with the news was Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott,
This is the explosive moment former Labour MP Ian Austin urges voters to back Boris Johnson. Austin, who announced that he was standing down as MP for Dudley North, told the Today programme that Corbyn is ‘completely unfit to lead our country’. He said that despite being a Labour party member since he was a
Anyone who doubts that the far left is more interested in winning the faction fight within the Labour party than a general election, should look at how it has treated Sally Gimson, the Labour candidate in Bassetlaw. At least she was the Labour candidate until yesterday when Jon Lansman, a director of Momentum (it is
On election night on 10 October 1974, the BBC broadcast a special episode of The Clangers, a children’s animated television series. The episode, ‘Vote for Froglet’, satirised the politics of the day, showing the gentle mouse-like Clangers rejecting a divisive two-party politics, essentially saying: ‘Sod off! The whole thing is a waste of everybody’s time!’ No two historical
The murder of Russian defector and fierce Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko was a radioactive wake-up call to many in the West about the nature of the Russian regime. Eight years later, the annexation of Crimea and subsequent invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 were also rightly condemned around the world. It’s safe to say these events
When you ask those at CCHQ why this election isn’t going to be like 2017, one of the answers they give is that Boris Johnson is a better campaigner than Theresa May. Tonight’s Tory launch was meant to show that off. The Tories held it in the evening so that they could have a crowd