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These results are dire for both main parties: the Tories finished fifth and Labour third. Theresa May’s resignation has taken some of the sting out of the Tory humiliation, but Jeremy Corbyn finds his leadership under more pressure than it has been since the 2017 general election result. Most worryingly for him, the membership is
The Brexit party has emerged as the big winner of the European elections. Nigel Farage’s party, formed just six weeks ago, surged to victory – winning 32pc of the votes and getting 29 of its candidates elected as MEPs. Only Merkel’s CDU has as many MEPs: they’re joint first. Unsurprisingly, Farage has been on a victory
It was Morten Morland who drew the first comparison between Emmanuel Macron and the story of the emperor’s new clothes. His cartoon is a deadly allegory, and not just for the vanity of Macron. Because the point of the story is not just that the emperor is a vain idiot, but that those who pretend
To clear up any confusion, American SATs are closer to A-levels than to British primary-school SATs. In my day, this hours-long test of maths and language mastery in the final year of high school was a bullet-sweating business. That score would dictate which colleges we could get into, and we took the results to heart
On 20 May, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, predicted that Donald Trump would fail to subdue Iran just as Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan had failed before him. That Alexander burned Persepolis to the ground and Genghis and his descendants wrought devastation before colonising the Persian plateau doesn’t connote defeat in the Iranian
It was with a mounting sense of disbelief that I counted the votes this evening in my commune in southern France. I’d expected a repudiation of President Emmanuel Macron, but not on this scale. “Catastrophe,” said the centrist deputy mayor as he scanned the voting tallies. At the end of the count, Macron’s list managed
Tonight was a vital night for the fledgling Remain party Change UK. After the resurgence of the Lib Dems in the local elections, Chuka Umunna and Heidi Allen’s party had to fight to justify its existence, and prove that it wasn’t simply another party which was splitting the Remain vote. Alas, it appears that that
The EU election results are in and it’s bad news for both of the main parties. Labour and the Tories have lost support while the pro-EU Liberal Democrats and Green Party have made significant gains. However, the big winner is the Brexit Party. Ahead of the vote, Nigel Farage’s new outfit was predicted to win
The results have begun to trickle in from the European elections tonight, and already it looks like Labour are being hammered from both sides, as they lose Leave voters to the Brexit Party and Remain voters to the Lib Dems and Greens. And with only one region announced, it already appears that the cracks are
In early results on Sunday evening, the Brexit Party’s dominance in the North East of England, the first region to be counted, could be a sign of things to come. Taking 39 per cent of the vote share, Nigel Farage’s party has secured two MEPs out of the three available in the region, with Labour taking
Dominic Raab – I’m ‘willing to walk away’ The starting gun for the Conservative leadership race has been fired and there are currently eight declared hopefuls jockeying for position. Dominic Raab, the former Brexit Secretary, who resigned in protest last year over the government’s draft withdrawal agreement, sat down with Andrew Marr to outline his
If the EU is unable to make a Brexit offer that is acceptable to Parliament by the Brexit deadline on 31 October, what then? This is the big question in the Tory leadership contest and – slowly – we’re getting answers. 1. No deal back on the table, an extension not ruled out Dominic Raab this morning
People sometimes ask what slogan could have swayed the Brexit vote: the opposite of the touchstone phrase ‘Take back control’. There are many suggestions, my own being: ‘Don’t leave — it’s what the French want us to do.’ No Europhile committee would ever have approved a jingoistic slogan, of course; yet the feelings of committed
For the latest competition, you were asked to dream up an imaginary animal that is a hybrid of two existing ones and write a poem about it. The discovery, some time ago, that the Romans called a giraffe a ‘camelopard’ (and Thomas Hood wrote an ‘Ode to the Cameleopard’) gave me the initial idea for
It’s one day since Theresa May set an exit date for her departure from 10 Downing Street and the leadership contest to replace her is already heating up. This morning, Rory Stewart – the International Development Secretary – performed a media round in which the Tory MP declared that he would not be able to
Theresa May will inevitably be remembered for the Brexit farce, but it may not turn out to be as harmful as some of her other legacies. In her resignation speech she claimed to have led ‘a decent, moderate and patriotic Conservative government on the common ground of British politics’. She said that our country was
The way to think about the Tory leadership contest is—I say in The Sun, this morning—that it is like a tournament with two sides of the draw, with each side sending one candidate into the final, membership round. One side of the draw is for full-on Brexiteers. Here Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab, Andrea Leadsom, Steve
After three long years, she’s finally gone. The Prime Minister decided to face the music on the steps of Downing Street yesterday, her voice audibly cracking with emotion as she announced the date of her resignation on 7 June, while her husband Philip May and her Downing Street staff watched sadly on. May’s departure should
The politics professor Matthew Goodwin made an interesting observation on Twitter this week. He pointed out that many of the characteristics of the ‘paranoid style’ in American politics — a phrase coined by Richard Hofstadter to describe right-wing populists such as Barry Goldwater — apply to left-wing anti-Brexit campaigners. They are convinced that the 2016
The Tory leadership has two stages: MPs will choose two finalists from what might be more than a dozen candidates, a process that should take about ten days. Then the final two will embark on a five-week campaign to win over the 125,000 Conservative Party members. If Boris Johnson makes it into the second stage, it
The mother of a little girl in my son’s year at school recently committed suicide. On the surface she was a radiant person, smiling and full of light. Devoted to her daughter, successful at work, always good for a laugh at the school gates. No one — save those loved ones who knew her private
Almost everyone agrees it is a pity that so few pupils from ‘disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds’ get into Oxford. But no one has successfully proved that it is Oxford’s fault that they do not. (I went to Cambridge, by the way, so I do not have a dog in this fight, except that I imagine the
Looking back on Narendra Modi’s first five years in office as India’s Prime Minister, it’s hard to find good news. Record-high joblessness, a stagnating economy, and continued widespread government corruption. With any other person, this would spell electoral defeat, but not for Modi. This week, the 68 year-old leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata
Labour’s constructive ambiguity on Brexit has served it well since the 2017 election. But as the country votes in European elections this week, has the party miscalculated in being too ambiguous? Nick Cohen writes in this week’s cover article that Labour should have positioned itself as the party of Remain, and now it faces being
The door of Number 10 had barely closed after Theresa May’s resignation statement this morning when Tory MPs began debating who would be the best person to replace her. Brexiteer and ERG deputy chairman Steve Baker certainly wasted no time today, but revealed that the candidate he was really thinking about was… Steve Baker. Asked by
After Theresa May announced that she will step down on Friday 7 June as the leader of the Conservative party, the race to find her successor is due to officially commence the following Monday. Conservative party chairman Brandon Lewis, along with the vice-chairs of the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers, have issued a joint statement
Theresa May has been forced from office by her own MPs because they concluded there would be no progress on delivering Brexit, or on anything important, while she remained their leader. But if they thought her government was characterised by factionalism and chaos, they ain’t seen nothing yet. Because the big facts of her failed
A few months before he died in 2007, Bill Deedes asked if I would come to see him at his home in Kent and bring Boris Johnson along with me. I was writing a biography of Bill at the time, and I knew he was miserable because he had broken his hip and could no
Pretty much all the bad things that people are saying today about Theresa May are true. She’s bad at politics, bad at communicating, bad at dealing with colleagues. She created the conditions that made her job as prime minister handling Brexit almost impossible. Her ‘red lines’ in the autumn of 2016 gave Britain almost no
Now that Theresa May has officially announced she is resigning as Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party, the various leadership contenders hoping to take her place will be furiously canvassing their colleagues and stepping up their campaigns. But who are the favourites to succeed her so far? According to the betting exchange $Markets,
It is official. Theresa May will resign as Tory party leader on 7 June and will continue as caretaker prime minister for a few short weeks. An emotional moment, possibly for much of the nation, certainly for her: she gulped and her eyes became tearful at the close. Her three years in office have been
One of the aims of Theresa May’s resignation statement was to try and shape the Brexit debate in the Tory party ahead of the forthcoming leadership contest. Her decision to emphasise the need to find consensus in parliament was a clear pop at those such as Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab, Esther McVey and Andrea Leadsom
After a tumultuous premiership, Theresa May has finally announced her resignation. She will step down as leader of the Conservative Party on June 7. Here is how Tory MPs have been reacting: Former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab, seen as a Brexiteer favourite, tweeted: Dignified as ever, @theresa_may showed her integrity. She remains a dedicated public
Ever since I first stepped through the door behind me as Prime Minister, I have striven to make the United Kingdom a country that works not just for a privileged few, but for everyone. And to honour the result of the EU referendum. Back in 2016, we gave the British people a choice. Against all