The problem with Billie Eilish’s Roe v. Wade intervention

The words ‘dark day’ went viral yesterday — in response to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in America. Women and men the world over took to social media and the airwaves to say that the news was a great leap backwards for humanity.

Almost nobody bothered to read the court’s opinion, of course, or even beyond the first two paragraphs of any news story on this actually rather complicated legal subject. But why should that stop people feeling really angry?

At Glastonbury, natch, the performers did their utmost to speak to the sombre mood while still somehow having fun. Billie Eilish, the headline act, said: ‘Today is a really, really dark day for women in the US’. The 20-year-old was speaking for all women everywhere — except, that is, for the significant number across the world who oppose abortion on demand. ‘I’m just going to say that because I can’t bear to think about it any longer,’ she added.

It was not Billie’s first foray into politics. She campaigned for Joe Biden at the Democratic National Convention in 2020 by urging voters to choose someone who ‘shares our values… It starts with voting against Donald Trump and for Joe Biden.’

Clearly she takes her role as an ambassador for young values seriously. But it’s interesting that Eilish seems so bothered about ‘darkness’ — given her whole schtick seems to be about introversion, vanity and gloom. ‘You should see me in a crown,’ is one of her songs — and as she sang it last night a big white screen showed a massively creepy spider dancing about. But that’s just art, I suppose. The real darkness is in the Supreme Court.

‘Don’t judge anyone,’ Eilish also said, earlier in her routine, as she gave out mental health instructions to the grateful crowd. I wonder if she thinks that people who feel passionately that human life is sacred and begins at conception should be judged? It’s not necessarily a dark day for them.

To any rational person who spends longer than 30 seconds considering the matter away from Instagram, it should be obvious that abortion — and particularly the legally highly contentious Roe verdict of 1973 —is a profound and complex matter.

At Glasto, however, the moral universe is simple — and very, very smug. Earlier, the artist Phoebe Bridgers did a similar ‘protest’ about the day’s big news. ‘This is my first time here. It’s surreal and amazing but I’m having a real ****** day,’ she said.

She cursed the ‘old’ Supreme Court justices ‘who try to tell us what to do with our bodies’.

What’s funny is how all these people, these Billies and Phoebes — and the millions of wannabe Billies and Phoebes — so often insist that they are tired of being silent. When were they ever silent about anything?

But this is just what happens when self-obsession eats politics. Yesterday, a woman on MSNBC summed up the mood nicely: ‘it feels like a betrayal. It feels like the country doesn’t love me. Or appreciate my body.’

There it is. The question of when a human life becomes a human life — or how liberal society should balance that with a woman’s rights — is reduced to braindead vapidities about feeling loved and whether or not the world shows sufficient regard for ‘my body.’

If Glastonbury festival goers want to reflect further on darkness, perhaps they should think about Volodymyr Zelensky’s appearance at Glastonbury yesterday. Zelensky, who is a performer by background, has become the must-have act at the big events this year — the Grammys, Cannes Film Festival, and now Glasto. Imagine all the frantic booking calls going to and from Kyiv!

Zelensky’s country is fighting a war that could define the future of Europe, thousands keep dying, but what’s really important is that we get to clap him live via video link.

Pete Doherty led a chant of ‘Ohhh Volodymyr Zelensky’ to the tune of ‘Ohhh Jeremy Corbyn’, the popular Glasto refrain circa 2017. The special Zelensky moonbeam appearance is at best odd, as my colleague Gus Carter suggested yesterday. But it might also be quite ‘dark’ — a sinister expression of how much we show we care to cover up our fundamental silliness and apathy.

Sing for your missiles Vlod, otherwise we might just forget all about you. Keep your people dying for our nebulous values while we prat about in fields listening to crap music. Just don’t come for our bodies.

Could Belarus join forces with Russia in Ukraine?

Next week Putin is due to meet Alyaksandr Lukashenka, self-proclaimed president of Belarus, for the sixth time since the invasion of Ukraine. This will also be the first time in three years that they have met in Belarus.

Much hooha is usually made by the Russian and Belarusian press of their meetings. There is always a ‘happy families’-style photoshoot: Lukashenka towering over Putin, grasping his hand in his meaty fist, looking like Laurel and Hardy’s grotesque reincarnation. According to official readouts, their long meetings tend to cover a variety of mundane topics: agricultural output, the state of their economies, general commitments of mutual support.

These meetings are, in themselves, nothing special – they have been a facet of Putin and Lukashenka’s relationship for many years. But this meeting will be significant for several reasons.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, speculation has been rife as to whether Belarus would join the war. Lukashenka has supported Putin, allowing him to transport troops and weaponry through the country and even permitting the Russian forces to launch long-range missiles at Kiev from Belarusian territory. He has frequently made speeches parroting the Kremlin’s disinformation and calling Russia’s victory in the ‘special operation’ inevitable. All of this has landed Belarus with nearly equivalent sanctions to Russia.

And yet, so far, Lukashenka has remained on the fence over officially joining the Kremlin’s war effort. This isn’t entirely surprising: Lukashenka has long been known to play off his geographical advantage, wedged between Europe and Russia, to gain concessions from both.

But Belarus’ contested election in 2020, in which Lukashenka claimed a highly dubious victory over Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, changed things. The election triggered wide-spread protests and a hugely repressive state crackdown on freedom of speech. This culminated last year with the arrest of exiled journalist Roman Protasevich, who was detained after the Ryainair flight he was on was hijacked in Belarusian airspace. The West reacted with horror, slapping sanctions on the country and ostracising Lukashenka and his cronies.

That Lukashenka has kept a grasp on power for nearly two years following that election has been, in main part, down to Putin’s support. And they both know it. The moment Putin decided to invade Ukraine was also the moment at which he began to cash in his chips with Lukashenka.

After next week’s meeting, the two presidents will have met as many times in the first six months of this year as in the whole of 2021. Many commentators speculate that, behind closed doors, Putin will once again attempt to persuade Lukashenka to enter the war.

So how likely is he to agree?

Putin’s visit to Belarus coincides with military exercises the Belarusian army plans to conduct in the Gomel region along the Ukrainian border. According to the Belarusian Ministry of Defence, to make the exercises as ‘close to reality as possible’ members of the army’s special operations forces will also take part.

While this may be a coincidence, experience of observing how Russia and its allies operate would warn against taking it at face value. After all, it was under the pretence of military exercises that Russia prepared for and invaded Ukraine back in February.

On the other hand, there are indications that Lukashenka has decided to sit tight on the fence for at least a little while longer. His rhetoric on the war has changed somewhat of late: at a speech in Bobruysk last week he said: ‘How this war will end – nobody knows. It’s impossible to give predictions.’

Lukashenka stands to lose a lot from joining the war in Ukraine, arguably more so than Putin. He is well aware that his power in Belarus hangs on by a whisker, largely propped up by the army and security services. Although official polling in Belarus is challenging, the indications are that, on the whole, Belarusians are overwhelmingly opposed to a war with Ukraine. In a country that still has conscription, sending recruits to fight an already unpopular war would be a hugely risky move.

Thus far, it seems Lukashenka’s desire for self-preservation has prevented him from fully throwing in his lot with Russia. He may well be hoping he can wait the whole thing out. Of course Putin will be hoping otherwise – their meeting next week may change things still.

But for everyone’s sake, let’s hope this horror show Hardy continues to sit on his fence for a little while yet.

Tory rebels plot a 1922 takeover

The Conservative party has a rather funereal air about it this morning, following this week’s two bruising by-election losses in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton, which saw the party get walloped in both the ‘red wall’ north and true blue south.

And since the losses it appears that Tory animosity towards the PM has been building up. Two former Tory party leaders, William Hague and Michael Howard, have now said that cabinet ministers should pressure Boris Johnson to leave No. 10, with Howard telling the World at One that:

‘The party and more importantly the country would be better off under new leadership. Members of the cabinet should very carefully consider their positions.’

Others in the party are calling on Boris Johnson to cut his Commonwealth trip to Rwanda short and scuttle back to the UK so he can sort out the mess his party is in.

The Tory rebels, meanwhile, have a bit of a problem: if Boris Johnson refuses to go, the 1922 Committee rules on leadership challenges will have to be changed to allow another no-confidence vote against the PM within the year.

Luckily for the plotters though two new champions are on hand: step forward Andrew Bridgen and Steve Baker.

Bridgen, the MP for North West Leicestershire, has announced that he will stand in the elections next month so he can sit on the 1922 executive Committee. And he’s been fairly explicit about why he’s in the running, telling GBNews that:

‘I’m going to put my hat in the ring on a manifesto of rule change. I think [for] all the candidate who will put their names forward next week for the committee, I have no doubt the major question is are you in favour or against rule change.’

Meanwhile, Steve Baker has also announced that he will put himself forward for a spot on the committee, according to the Telegraph. Baker has been one of the PM’s harshest critics and has been calling for Boris Johnson to step down as PM since April this year. No guesses what he’ll do either if elected. 

The challengers have laid down their gauntlets, now it’s time to see how No. 10 will respond…

Are we heading towards a British Donald Trump?

The Tiverton and Wakefield by-elections are, of course, shatteringly bad for the Conservatives and Boris Johnson. They should finally destroy any illusions Conservatives hold about the PM’s electoral appeal. As I and several others have often pointed out, Boris is not a Heineken politician and hasn’t been one since the middle of the last decade.

Analysis of by-election results is often bad. In the minutes and hours after the result, commentators scramble to explain what local results mean for national politics, in a crowded field where political actors are doing their best to skew the narrative in their own interests. That being so, I’m not going to try to tell you what Tiverton and Wakefield mean for Johnson’s future or the next general election.

Instead, I’m going to suggest that the numbers from the by-elections aren’t the most important facts in British politics this week. Instead, the numbers that matter are 9.1 and 26.

The 9.1 is the current rate of inflation on the CPI measure. Twenty-six is the percentage of respondents in the Ipsos Mori Issues Tracker poll who spontaneously named ‘lack of faith in politicians’ as one of the most important issues facing the UK today.

That’s the highest level recorded by Ipsos Mori since ‘faith in politicians’ was added as an option in the survey in 2016. In other words, voters are more unhappy with politics as a whole now than they were through all those awful, deadlocked years of post-Brexit gridlock, and more unhappy than they were when people were dying in large numbers during the pandemic.

I don’t think it’s a big leap to suggest that the two numbers are linked. People are getting poorer in real terms, and politicians as a whole don’t appear to have a good response. Unless that changes, the real story of British politics isn’t going to be ‘Conservatives Down, Labour Up’ or whatever, not least because voters are generally far less interested in party politics than people who work in politics are.

Instead, the story is going to be ‘they’re all rubbish.’ Focusing on the (uncontestable) fact that Boris Johnson and the Conservatives are regarded as being significantly more rubbish than Keir Starmer and Labour is therefore to stare at a tree rather than see the whole wood. And that wood is a country where economic pain is combining with a lack of convincing political leadership of any sort to leave the public mood discontented and potentially volatile.

Such a mood makes big changes possible. The person who offers to break the current, unimpressive pattern of British politics could reap large rewards.

It could well be that the biggest political winner of this unhappy period is not yet visible. A new leader who emerges to offer a bit of optimism to the electorate could do surprisingly well, and widen the range of possible outcomes for the next election.

That winner could emerge from the current establishment, on either side.

Boris Johnson could be replaced as Conservative leader by someone more popular. Keir Starmer could just resign over the Durham police ‘beergate’ inquiry and be replaced by someone more inspiring. For either party, a new leader could just prove transformative.

Or perhaps that new winner will come from outside the current system. Neither Tony Blair nor Nigel Farage has gone away. Both remain interested in and quietly active in politics. Neither lacks ambition or energy.

While a successful comeback for either man would be a surprise, no one should be shocked if one or both of the political tribes they represent (liberal centrism and conservative nativism) manage to summon up new champions to challenge the existing order.

Are we approaching the moment for a British Donald Trump? Or an English Emmanuel Macron? Or even both? The British party system has proved remarkably durable over the last decade, but conditions for systemic challenge and upheaval have rarely looked more favourable.

Poll: voters split over rail strikes

Mick Lynch has become something of a break-out star since his round of media interviews on Tuesday. The boss of the Rail and Maritime Transport union has won many fans on the left for his uncompromising views on the industrial action which brought chaos across the country this week. But it seems that, for all his undoubted media savvy, it’s far from clear whether Lynch’s case has had any cut-through with the public.

For a new poll of 1,500 adults for The Spectator by Redfield and Wilton on Wednesday found that, a day after the union walkout, 41 per cent opposed and 32 per cent support the rail workers’ strike to achieve pay rises in line with inflation. This is up from 1 June when 35 per cent supported and 29 per cent opposed the strike. By a ten point margin, voters also agree with Boris Johnson’s criticism of the strike as an ‘unnecessary aggravation’, with 42 per cent sharing this view compared to 32 per cent who disagree.

Exactly half (50 per cent) of the public now fear the risk of a ‘wage-price spiral,’ with only 15 per cent being willing to pay more in transit fares so that the strike can end. Voters share Sir Keir Starmer’s doubts about whether to back the industrial action, with 31 per cent arguing that Labour should oppose it. This is narrowly more than the 29 per cent who think that Labour should support the strikes versus the 25 per cent who think the party should remain neutral.

Blame is also shared as to who is blame for the strike: 37 per cent say the unions but nearly a third (32 per cent) opt for the government. Unsurprisingly, that means that 38 per cent say the rail unions will receive ‘more blame’ from them the longer the strike goes on, while 33 per cent saying so for ministers in Westminster. While Boris Johnson’s team may take some heart from such findings, the voters aren’t entirely happy with some of his choices, with nearly half (46 per cent) finding it ‘contradictory’ for the government to increase universal credit and state pensions in line with inflation but not the wages of public sector employees.

And they better ought to watch out for future strikes too, with 47 per cent of the public willing to support nurses and doctors going on strike. With union activists in these professions beginning to flex their muscles, it could well be a summer of discontent facing Johnson and his colleagues soon.

Boris will keep losing until he tackles inflation

The Tories took a serious beating in Thursday’s by-elections. Whilst Boris Johnson and his government refuse to take responsibility for the big issue of the day – inflation – and fail to convey any meaningful central purpose to their government (‘levelling up’ being clearly nothing more than an empty soundbite) they will continue to face huge electoral defeats. It really is as simple as that.

When I say the government needs to take responsibility for inflation the immediate question is: ‘So how would you get it down?’ But that is the wrong place to begin. The first thing the government needs to do is to take political and policy responsibility for inflation. At present, whenever he talks about inflation Boris Johnson looks to blame someone else. It’s all the fault of Putin, or of rapacious capitalists forcing up prices, or greedy unions demanding too high wage rises, or deluded Tory backbench MPs calling for tax cuts. The first step – by far the most fundamental – is for the government to accept and declare that the rate of inflation is something it can control and that it will take responsibility for controlling.

Obviously it’s politically tempting to declare that bad things are all someone else’s fault. But that won’t wash with Tory voters who imbibed with their mother’s milk the idea that the great Tory triumph of the 1980s was getting inflation down. It just reinforces a political message that Johnson’s government always wants to claim that everything is always someone else’s fault.

It also presents a disturbing message to voters that they are helpless in the face of the forces that steer their lives. This government was all about ‘taking back control’ of the policy choices that affect us. How did the government ever come to believe that didn’t apply to inflation?

Furthermore, the idea that inflation is some randomly induced phenomenon leaves workers and businesses all at sea in pay negotiations. Workers naturally want their wages to rise to protect them from future inflation. But by how much do they need to rise to achieve that? The government gives the impression inflation is not under its control. It has no credible target for inflation for the next couple of years. Notionally the inflation target is 2 per cent. Literally no one believes that the government wants the Bank of England to get inflation to 2 per cent in 2022. That 2 per cent number is some kind of mañana target. But if inflation is going to come down to 2 per cent in four years’ time, what is it to be in the meantime? Workers and businesses have to work out what wages to ask for and grant now, not at some vague future date.

The government needs to accept responsibility for inflation and tell us what its objectives are for inflation now. What inflation rate does it hope to achieve over the next 12 months? And over the year after that? That is what businesses and workers and investors and household budget-planners need to know.

Under our current system the government tells the Bank of England the inflation target it should seek to achieve. The Bank isn’t supposed to pick its own objective. But at present the government isn’t setting the Bank any target it genuinely wants the Bank to achieve. That central aspect of monetary policy is broken.

Mid-1970s inflation and late-1970s inflation were both heavily affected by oil price rises, as was inflation in 2008. There is nothing new about the current situation. It’s not even vaguely true that policy could not affect inflation now. For example, more rapid interest rate rises would strengthen the pound (or at least see it fall by less). A stronger pound would mean lower import prices – including in particular lower prices for importing energy.

Looking slightly further ahead, tighter monetary policy would mean some prices falling to offset rises in prices elsewhere, so the average price level change (i.e. inflation) would be lower. There’s no mystery as to how that could be achieved.

That doesn’t mean that’s necessarily a good idea. Maybe a credible inflation target would make the Bank tighten policy slower, cutting inflation by less than it would otherwise do. But let’s actually have this argument. At present there is no responsibility taken for inflation, so we can’t even argue it should be cut more slowly.

Rises in the cost of living are economically damaging and politically disastrous for governments. But rises seen (or in this case presented by the government) as out of control are even worse. If the government wants to recover politically it needs to take back control of inflation – soon.

How the war on Roe was won

When did it become certain that American women’s abortion rights would fall? The Supreme Court’s ruling that ‘Roe was egregiously wrong from the start’ was leaked almost two months ago, so the formal release of the judgment yesterday is bitter but hardly a surprise.

Certainly, Donald Trump can take a lot of the credit. Somehow, an administration that gave every impression of being a blazing car crash from which hapless apparatchiks were ejected at speed managed to appoint three — three! — Supreme Court judges, every one of them a copper-bottomed social conservative.

But he could never have achieved that without the unlikely help of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that liberal icon of jurisprudence, who missed the chance to retire under Obama and just went on working till her last breath at 87, in 2020.

While Ginsburg was winning go-girl cheers for her workouts, the other side could comfortably wait for her to die. Her reward for her service was to be replaced with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a staunch pro-lifer who was the final piece in dooming of Roe (and who is likely to support the reversal of gay rights too).

Then again, Ginsburg could have enjoyed her final victory laps as a feminist hero at no cost to the feminist cause as a whole, if only Barack Obama had seen through one of his campaign promises and signed the Freedom of Choice bill.

This legislation, which would have codified Roe v. Wade, would be ‘the first thing I’d do as president’, he said in 2007. Once he became president, though, it was relegated to ‘not my highest legislative priority’. It turns out it’s quite hard for the arc of justice to bend towards history if the guy in charge can’t be bothered to apply any force to the issue.

Go back further. Go back to the eighteenth century, if you’re Justice Samuel Alito, author of the majority opinion. ‘It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,’ he wrote. And what indeed could be more authoritative on a matter of medicine and gender than a document written in 1787, predating both germ theory and women’s right to own property.

Thirteen states already have ‘trigger laws’ in place ready for the end of Roe, meaning abortion will be banned within a month. Abortion opponents were ready for this. Abortion opponents have been ready for a very long time.

Why, then, have America’s pro-choicers been so utterly abject in the face of it? I mean Obama, and I mean Ginsburg, and I also mean organisations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, which have spent the last few years doing more to campaign against the word ‘woman’ than they have to campaign for women’s rights.

Chase Strangio of the ACLU actually had the gall to tweet: ‘Glad we spent so much time and energy discussing the use of the term “pregnant person” — definitely served us well.’ Which, given that no one was arguing about the term ‘pregnant person’ till he and his cohort decided to impose it, feels a bit rich.

While the right has diligently chipped away at women’s rights, the left’s response has been to offer nothing but blackmail. Stick with us, because the other guys are even worse. Sure, it feels undignified to call yourself a ‘menstruator’ or a ‘uterus bearer’, but that’s the cost of admission to the big liberal tent. If you don’t want to be reduced to your reproductive system, better start by reducing yourself to your reproductive system.

What a joke. The right won their war on Roe because they took abortion seriously. The left lost because they treated it as a triviality, a done deal, something they could threaten women with (imagine if you lost this!) but never had to actively defend.

Feminism ascended to the status of fashion accessory — a background for Beyonce, a Teen Vogue vertical — without having accomplished all that much in the US. It’s worth remembering that American women have no national statutory maternity leave. (Still, nearly half of Democrat men under 50 and quarter of women believe that ‘feminism has done more harm than good’).

You might think a pro-life policy would start with employment protection for the women who are supposed to raise these sacred babies, but alas no. There is a terminal inability on the right to imagine that the woman who carries an unwanted baby to term is the same woman who won’t be able to pay her rent four weeks later because she can’t go to work.

But this is no different from the left’s insistence that there is no ‘woman’ here at all, merely a colocation of unrelated organs for birthing, feeding, bleeding. Obama managed not to mention the word ‘woman’ in his tweet about the Supreme Court ruling. Nor did the Democrat’s favourite feminist firecracker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. America is, simply, a very bad place to be female, and with the end of Roe it becomes considerably worse.

Some women will die of unsafe procedures. Many will take their chances with black-market telemedicine — and become criminals if they end up in hospital. Those who miscarry will be objects of suspicion. Others will have babies they cannot care for. Some of those babies will die, too. But the victims of Roe’s fall will be, most of all, women. America’s women will have to relearn how to name themselves before they can save themselves.

Guerilla warfare and targeted assassinations: Inside Ukraine’s partisan resistance

Dmytro Savluchenko was one of Moscow’s useful idiots: a Ukrainian advocate of Russkiy Mir (or ‘Russian world’), Putin’s idea of a kind of reich of Russian-speaking peoples. Back in 2014, when the Russian army stormed the Donbas region, Savluchenko
campaigned for Kherson (an area bordering Crimea) to join Russia. More recently, Savluchenko has served as a senior official in the Russian-installed administration of Ukraine’s occupied Kherson region. His career ended this morning, when he was killed by a car bomb.

His killing marks the start of a new phase in the war: guerilla warfare and targeted assassination. ‘Our partisans have another victory…a Russian activist and traitor was blown up in a car in one of Kherson’s yards in the morning. This will be the case with every traitor’, said Serhiy Khlan, an adviser to the Kherson Military Administration (part of the Ukrainian government).

So was this a special forces hit job? Or gangsterism? Denis Kazansky, a Ukrainian journalist, published photos after the explosion, saying that there has been plenty of looting and that ‘the possibility of criminal showdowns cannot be ruled out… the ‘parade of explosions’ that is now taking place from Melitopol to Kherson is not always the work of the Security Service of Ukraine. Bandits and robbers willingly settle scores with each other, since it is very convenient to attribute all these murders and explosions to Ukrainian saboteurs.’

Savluchenko is not the first person in Kherson to be targeted in this way. On 18 June, an explosion happened near the car of Yevgeny Sobolev, who was appointed by the Russian authorities as the head of the Penitentiary Service. Before the occupation, he held the position of head of the Ukrainian penal colony No. 90, a prison in Kherson. Sobolev survived the blast, but he was hospitalised with serious injuries. Nobody claimed responsibility for the explosion, but Russian media pointed the finger at Ukrainian saboteurs.

When Russian troops occupied Crimea they went on a heart-and-minds drive, building roads and renovating property. In Kherson, they tried to offer Russian passports and food but soon found it futile. The response of one Ukrainian old woman to a Russian soldier – ‘put sunflower seeds in your pocket so they grow when you die’ – has become a popular phrase that sums up the spirit of resistance. There are popular videos, too, like the man who jumped on top of a Russian tank during the a protest declaring that ‘Kherson is Ukraine’.

Meanwhile, the Russian occupiers have used tactics of repression: they shot dead unarmed civilians who tried to stop an armoured convoy of Russian troops in Kherson. 

The partisan resistance fighting back against Russia is, for now, a mix of special forces and pro-Ukrainian locals. It’s not an analogy everyone will welcome, but the recent history of Afghanistan and Iraq showed how insurgency can dislodge even the best-armed militaries from foreign territory. As an anti-occupation tactic, insurgency has proved effective over the last two decades. Ukraine is fighting to stop Putin taking territory, but also to stop him keeping it. It now falls to Ukrainians to see how this tactic can stop Russia taking hold of the lands it seized.

Boris’s unapologetic by-election response

Boris Johnson has not accepted responsibility for the two by-election defeats. You could have written this line at any point today and it would be true – and it remains the case after the Prime Minister gave a press conference from the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Kigali. He said the party needed to ‘listen to the messages that we are getting’ but made clear that the message he was hearing was that the government needed to focus not on Westminster matters but on delivering the things that mattered to the British people. It’s almost as though Johnson hasn’t realised that the reason his party keeps getting mired in these internal rows isn’t bad luck or the desire of people to, as he put it today, ‘beat me up’, but in fact his own conduct and judgement. The Prime Minister said: 

On Oliver, I think he did a lot of good work, particularly as chairman… and I thank him for his service, but I genuinely, genuinely don’t think the way forward in British politics is to focus on issues of personalities, whether they are mine or others, the way forward is to make arguments to people about change that we are delivering. And that is what we want to do.I think that the government has got some difficult stuff right, people are going through a tough time, we understand that. I think that we have the best way forward. I think that we understand how to fix our economic issues, how to make sure that we have a stronger economy.There will still be some tough times ahead and no doubt that some people will continue to beat me up and say this or that about – and to attack me, and that’s fine, that’s quite right. That’s the job of politicians, in the end, voters, journalists, they have no-one else to make their complaints to.

It is all very well talking repeatedly about the need for delivery. If you don’t then actually do the boring job of the delivery then you are merely directing people to pay closer attention to your policy failures. As James sets out in this week’s magazine, the government is currently stuck in the position of making policies merely because they might appease a certain angry faction of the Conservative party – rather than because they are the right ones, or because they might work. 

Indeed, Johnson defended his deportation policy during the press conference with the argument that it will save lives by deterring people traffickers from using Channel crossings, but not only is there little evidence of this, there isn’t even much certainty that the policy will happen. Even if it doesn’t happen, it will have served its purpose in creating a talking point. But that is not what delivery is about. Indeed, it’s the opposite.

The Price of being Katie

Katie Price has, yet again, avoided prison. She was up at Lewes Crown Court on Friday, this time for breaching a restraining order; from what I can work out from the asterisks-laden news reports, she had texted her ex-husband’s fiancée, calling her a ‘gutter slag’. As an avid Katie Price fan, I have watched the last few years of her life unfold through my fingers. In between her facelifts, numerous reality TV shows and her eight engagements, a week rarely goes by without her being in the headlines for something serious. Over the last decade she has been banned from driving six times and earlier this year she dodged prison after failing to repay £3.2 million in debt by declaring herself bankrupt.

Where did it all go wrong? Although she has never been far from controversy, recently there has been a clear deterioration. We’re all allowed to behave badly in our twenties, but she’s now a 44-year-old mother of five. A shtick that was once charmingly chaotic has turned into something slightly sad. Katie Price may have never been a national sweetheart, not in the conventional sense like Emma Watson or Keira Knightley, but there was something totally lovable about her. Her nonchalant attitude – a page three girl with a gob – saw her carve out a unique place in public life.

Her career as a glamour model started at the Sun, where she would bare all at just 17-years-old under the pseudonym Jordan. The fake identity would later play a part in her downfall, a kind of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde dynamic in which she’d often jokingly wave away criticism saying, ‘That wasn’t me, it was Jordan’. As time went on, and her boobs got bigger, more fame led to more drama. The crescendo came in 2004 when Price met Peter Andre on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. The nation watched these two tabloid stars begin what papers like to call a ‘whirlwind romance’, with Price promising to drop the ‘Jordan’ moniker forever.

Their very public marriage didn’t last long, and after four years, two children and a nine-series reality show, Katie & Peter, out came the divorce papers. At the time it was publicly accepted as Katie’s fault. She admitted herself that her out of control drinking and party lifestyle didn’t help. But then, that’s why so many of us love her: there’s something naively confessional about the way she talks about her own failings. In hindsight, Peter Andre seems as much to blame. But blame isn’t Katie’s style.

Old clips have resurfaced showing patronising Pete appearing to goad his former wife. Most women would at least give him a stern look or a passive-aggressive poke, but Katie seemed to just take it with nothing more than a Botoxed smile. Throughout their appearances together she was often the punchline to his jokes, telling strangers that she became famous for ‘putting out.’ Evidence of Pete’s behaviour towards Katie has formed a new TikTok sub-genre: ‘Pete Andre is a narcissist.’

Andre seems to be part of a precedent. In May 2002, while Katie was secretly 14 weeks pregnant, she found out live on camera that the father, Premier League footballer Dwight Yorke, had cheated on her. The British press did what they do best, asking incessantly what she would possibly do to get him back, suggesting that she was the one who had done something wrong. Since then, Yorke has had no part of Harvey’s life, blaming his absence from his severely disabled son on scheduling issues and ‘being based up in Manchester’. Dwayne, like Pete, was supposed to love and take care of her. But there’s no space for difficulty and suffering in showbiz.

In reality, few would have heard of Katie Price unless she got her top off. Her life was made between the pages of tabloid newspapers and now that’s where it’s falling apart. Even now when her life is visibly in a state of decline, TV crews will happily give her airtime. What she really needs, like so many wayward women in the public eye, is a stern word and a hug. What she gets is an ever diminishing dose of media attention. Last September, after appearing on This Morning for the umpteenth time, she drove home and rolled her car after an all-night binge. A car-crash TV joke seems cheap. But Katie, for all her flaws, has still got a sense of humour.

She’s no angel. A few months ago a judge told her that she has the worst driving sheet they’d ever seen. Her outbursts are becoming more frequent and each boyfriend seems more vacuous than the last. (The latest has even been banned from her sister’s wedding, brought forward so that Katie could attend in case she was imprisoned). A few years ago she even brought a TV crew to rehab. Perhaps she feels ITV3 is the safest place to hide: if people at home are watching, at least she still matters. Katie Price has always been the butt of other people’s jokes, but she has never seemed to begrudge the soft cruelty. Price is a kind of Estuary Dolly Parton, committed to kindness and entertainment above all. Now, as her life seems to be coming apart, she’s doing the only thing she knows how to do: monetising her suffering to pay the bills and stay relevant.

Zelensky’s peculiar Glastonbury appearance

Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t quite make it onto the Glastonbury line-up posters. Perhaps Michael Eavis, the owner of ever-so Worthy Farm, had last-minute difficulties with the Ukrainian President’s booking agent. No matter. An eight-foot-high image of President Zelensky’s face graced the Pyramid Stage on Friday, right before ageing indie rockers The Libertines belted out their two-decades-old bangers. ‘Time for Heroes’, but not before festival-goers had enjoyed a brief set by Europe’s very own hero. You’d be forgiven for thinking the shtick’s getting a bit tired – but at least Pete Doherty can just about hold a tune.

‘Glastonbury is the greatest concentration of freedom these days,’ Zelensky told the festival. And what greater expression of freedom is there than tucking into over-priced Vietnamese street food while some besieged leader begs your government for more weapons? Perhaps Stoke Newington’s exiles in Somerset could pop over to the Kyiv tent, nestled somewhere between Water Aid and Greenpeace, and sponsor an NLAW? They barely managed the syllabically-strained rendition of ‘Oh, Volodymyr Zelensky’ (à la ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’). But then perhaps he isn’t quite as popular with the Glasto crowd as the old Russophile Labour leader.

You can’t really blame Zelensky. He’s doing all he can to drum up support for his country. But there’s something incongruous about this virtual world tour. A couple of months ago, Vlod was beamed into Las Vegas for the Grammys so he could chivvy up support from pop stars and producers. A few hours later, he visited the site of the Bucha massacre.

It’s the PR-iness of the thing that feels strange. After all, propaganda is still propaganda, even if you happen to agree with it. But then Zelensky came to power as an actor, someone who had lampooned the office of the president so successfully that his countrymen thought he might actually do a good job of the gig. Now he’s been cast as a war-time leader, perhaps the greatest part any actor-politician could hope for. The invasion is, after all, even more blockbuster than Top Gun 2.

Perhaps that’s what Ukraine really needs: its own leading man to rally the troops. I doubt he’s down there in the bunker directing battalions and planning supply routes. Instead, he’s out there in ‘the battle for the airwaves’, a phrase loftily thrown about by those who think themselves insusceptible to agitprop. In the modern era, even conflicts need a hypeman.

It goes without saying that what’s happening in Ukraine is beyond grim. And from what I can see, Zelensky is doing a pretty good job of holding it together. But the strange thing about Ukraine is that we all seem to want a part of the story. No longer are world crises something to be watched from afar. The invasion has been subsumed into the ‘experience economy’. As Ed Cumming recently wrote in the Telegraph, Vlod has become the ultimate celeb accessory. Earlier this week he met with the Hollywood actor Ben Stiller, but even Zoolander couldn’t out-do Zelensky’s rendition of ‘blue steel’.

His gruff cajoling tone, his pectoral-enhancing military t-shirts, the stern straight-down-the-camera look. It’s extraordinarily good branding. And it’s been perfectly honed for us, the well-meaning western viewer. Look at him. The ultimate hero. And he needs our – my! – help.

Where does all this end? Insurgencies, on average, tend to last around a decade. Are we going to see Zelensky, Paul McCartney-like, wheeled out to perform his greatest hits well into his eighties? What jamboree will be complete without a quick guest appearance? An after dinner speech here, an awards ceremony there. Because it feels increasingly like we aren’t really listening. What matters is that we get our own little sliver of history, a quick Instagram story of Zelensky on the big screen to show that we #StillCare.

The truth about the Roe v. Wade abortion ‘ban’

You wait decades for landmark reforms in America and then, like culture-war buses, two come along at once. Earlier this week, the Senate passed a gun control bill – the most significant firearm control legislation in US history. Now, the Supreme Court has voted 6-3 to overturn Roe v. Wade – as everyone expected since Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion was leaked on 2 May.

‘The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,’ a syllabus of the opinion said.

There will be lots of anger all over the world – on social media and the streets. Attacks on offices tied to the Republican National Committee, GOP lawmakers, and pro-life groups have been going for weeks and will now intensify. Supreme Court Justices will receive more death threats. People are willing to kill for their right to abort.

‘We should be concerned,’ says Rep. Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican. ‘Democrats here need to come out and speak against the violence.’

We’ll have to wait and see: the Democrats don’t have a great record at denouncing violence they regard as righteous. Remember how long it took senior figures in the Democratic party to speak out against the looting that took place during the Black Lives Matter riots?

Barack Obama has tweeted that the news is ‘devastating’ – and underneath the rather-too-public expressions of grief for women’s rights you can sense a certain excitement among political types that the religious right has gone too far this time. The hope among Democrats is that a massive backlash against the overturning of Roe will help them in the mid-terms and ‘change the narrative’ in their favour after months of terrible polling.

But the issue might not shake out in the way that American progressives hope. The truth is that abortion hasn’t been ‘banned’ in America. The issue has been returned to states, as Alito says in his ruling, ‘it is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.’ Yes, the ruling clears the way for more conservatives states to outlaw or severely restrict access to abortion. But Roe was always a badly argued ruling, even if it has now been established for half a century, as many pro-abortion legal scholars accept.

As with guns, it’s possible that politicians in Congress will now reach a legislative compromise that restricts abortions but doesn’t ban them. In Mississippi, following today’s ruling, most abortions will be illegal after 15 weeks – roughly in line with most European nations. A significant majority of Americans do favour abortion rights, however polling on term limits and the actual implications of Roe is more muddling.

Then again, when moral issues are not seen by politicians as matters of conscience but as occasions for ‘firing up the base’ – compromise seems unlikely.

Roe is gone – what happens now?

The US Supreme Court has today officially overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling which gave women the constitutional right to have an abortion. The Court had been examining the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, which was challenging a Mississippi law which banned abortion after 15 weeks.

Following the Dobbs decision, some states will now serve as sanctuaries for the unborn, while others will be sanctuaries for women seeking abortions, sometimes right up until the moment of birth.

Let’s start with the states that have ‘trigger laws’ to ban abortion if Roe is overturned. They are Arkansas, Kentucky, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming and Utah.

The states that codify abortion into law irrespective of the Supreme Court are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Washington, DC.

In other words, abortion states outnumber pro-life states 18 to 13, while the rest have neither an immediate ban nor a codification in place. For these states, the heightened tensions will make for a fierce debate in the coming days. People on both sides of the issue will be fighting vehemently, and abortion will become a much larger political issue in elections to come.

There are others among the 19 states without ‘trigger laws’ that may soon restrict abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a Planned Parenthood-funded pro-choice think tank, states that may act against abortion in the coming days are Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Some of these states have pre-Roe legislation that will come back into effect, such as Arizona and Michigan, while others have laws that prevent abortions six weeks after pregnancy, such as South Carolina and Ohio.

Congress will certainly try to pass legislation regulating abortion and preventing the states from banning it outright. The most extensive act on abortion before the ruling was the Women’s Health Protection Act in 2021, which would have forced all the states to provide some access to abortion. It was passed by the House but died in the Senate. However, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Congress may try to resurrect it.

There’s also the matter of public opinion, which pro-choicers have repeatedly said supports Roe v. Wade. Yet polls have consistently found that wide majorities support banning abortion in most cases in the second and third trimesters as well as backing other restrictions like parental notification statutes. With abortion policy back in the hands of voters, it will be interesting to see how these preferences translate into law.

Adding to the tension, Jane’s Revenge, a pro-abortion group, has been vandalising and firebombing pregnancy centres around the United States, most recently in Washington, DC. They became active when a Dobbs decision draft authored by judge Samuel Alito was leaked. In various posters around DC, the group has threatened a ‘Night of Rage’ after the Dobbs ruling comes down.

Either way, drama is sure to follow. The Dobbs decision directly affects a pivotal issue in American society, and there will be plenty of outrage to go around. But for the first time since the 1970s, the American people will be allowed to democratically deliberate on the issue of abortion.

This article first appeared in The Spectator’s World edition. 

The most revealing line in Dowden’s resignation letter

The resignation of the party chairman Oliver Dowden is so damaging for Boris Johnson because the issue in Tiverton was not the campaign that CCHQ ran. You can’t put a 30 point swing down to the choice of candidate or the campaign tactics.

Dowden is a party man through and through, a loyalist to the core. He worked at CCHQ, then in David Cameron’s Downing Street before becoming an MP. He has helped prepare the last three Tory leaders for PMQs. He isn’t seen as particularly personally ambitious which makes his resignation all the more telling: no one can accuse him of being on leadership manoeuvres.

In 2019, Dowden’s backing of Johnson was seen as a sign that he was the best choice for the party, and that for the good of the party people should put their doubts aside. For him to go now because someone should take ‘responsibility’ and the party ‘cannot carry with business as usual’ raises the question of what the Conservatives should do now.

In the final line of his letter Dowden declares, ‘I will, as always, remain loyal to the Conservative party’. But there is no declaration of loyalty to Johnson personally. It suggests that Dowden has come to the conclusion that these two loyalties are now in conflict.

Tune in to this special episode of Spectator TV discussing the by-election with Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Cindy Yu:

Tory party chair: runners and riders

So. Farewell then Oliver Dowden. The Hertsmere MP resigned as co-chairman of the Conservative party this morning, following last night’s by-election defeats in Tiverton and Wakefield. He was appointed to the post in September and was tasked with guiding the Tory machine through the mid-term blues and focus CCHQ on winning the next general election. Now though, he’s gone, and a successor must be appointed.

The Tories have opted in recent years to adopt a co-chairmanship model. Typically one is an oleaginous, wealthy individual whose job is to raise funds from other oleaginous, wealthy individuals. This role was performed with aplomb by Lord Feldman during the Cameron years and is now filled by Ben Elliot. The other co-chairman is usually an ambitious loyalist, willing to do the thankless task of the morning media round and deliver a decent stump speech on the reception circuit.

At election time, the chairmanship is critical and can act as a springboard to higher office: Cecil Parkinson made his name in 1983 and would have secured a Great Office of State, had it not been for his affair. But between elections the post takes on far less significance. Given the widely-held expectation that the next contest will not be until 2024, Boris Johnson may choose to appoint someone as an effective placeholder for the next 18 months and then shuffle them out before campaigning begins.

There is of course no guarantee that Johnson will immediately appoint Dowden’s successor. One MP suggested to Mr S that the PM’s trip to Rwanda means he could wait until his return to do a wider ministerial reshuffle as he seeks to reset his premiership. The other interesting element in Johnson’s calculations will be whether he chooses to pick a Tory from a so-called ‘Red Wall’ or ‘Blue Wall’ seat, whose mind would be more inclined to focus on the challenge from Labour or the Lib Dems, respectively.

North or south, loyalist or critic, campaigner or media performer? These are the questions that will inform Johnson’s decision as to who will take Dowden’s place. Below are some of the names that are doing the rounds among Tory MPs as they discuss the fall-out from last night’s results and their survival in office…

James Cleverly

Been a Boris-backer since their time together at City Hall in London. Well-liked across the party, he’s currently a Foreign Office minister, having served as party co-chair during the triumphant 2019 election.

Nigel Adams

Another ardent loyalist, his shadow whipping operation is credited with saving Johnson’s premiership back in February. He’s standing down from his seat at the next election, meaning all his energies could be devoted to ensuring others don’t lose theirs too. Organised the parliamentary party dinner in March and can work a room like few others can…

Michael Ellis

The minister for sticky wickets has regularly been called upon to deploy all his lawyerly skills in the House, defending the PM over Partygate. The Paymaster-General has his fans in Johnson’s team but that respect is not shared by all across parliament.

Priti Patel

Has long been mooted for a move out of the Home Office after a mixed three years in the role. Her switch would signal a broader ministerial shake-up.

Craig Williams

Currently the Parliamentary Private Secretary to Rishi Sunak. Known as a good campaigner and savvy operator. Sits for Montgomeryshire, where the main threat is from the Lib Dems.

Luke Hall

Another Tory in a Lib-Dem facing seat. Hall’s Thornbury and Yate constituency is one of those South West seats which David Cameron picked up in 2015 to win his surprise victory. Currently Dowden’s deputy at CCHQ as party vice-chair. Though as one source quipped to Mr S: ‘not sure what that counts for…’

Justin Tomlinson

Another incumbent vice-chairman and well-respected as an effective campaigner, having won his North Swindon seat off Labour in 2010.

Kemi Badenoch

A punchy performer in the Commons and has enthusiastic support from certain sections of the party membership.

Michael Fabricant

Will be in the bunker with Boris, Carrie and Dilyn until the end. Always keen to defend the PM, no matter how ludicrous the hill on which to die.

Tory MPs: don’t blame Boris for these by-elections

The partygate scandal has left a long hangover. Westminster is waking up to the news that Tory seats in both the ‘red’ and ‘blue wall’ have fallen respectively to the Lib Dems and Labour. In true form, Sir Ed Davey is claiming the Tiverton result is the ‘biggest by-election victory we’ve ever seen’ (it wasn’t) while it transpires that harping on about Harold Shipman in Wakefield isn’t a good strategy for holding a northern marginal either. Oliver Dowden, the Conservative party co-chair, has already bit the bullet this morning by resigning – but there’s one person who definitely isn’t to blame according to some of his colleagues: Boris Johnson.

Already the more stringent Boris backers are lining up behind the man they call ‘the boss’ to claim that Johnson’s recent woes had absolutely nothing to do with the two stonking defeats. Early out the blocks was Michael Fabricant, the sage of Staffordshire. He believes the loss of one of the top 100 Tory seats on a 30 per cent swing is ‘not surprising’ as the ‘cost of living crisis to blame’ but the ‘media will try to say it’s all about Boris as they are desperate to get rid of him.’ If only we knew who the First Lord of the Treasury was, eh?

On Sky News, meanwhile, Paul Scully had the invidious job of defending the PM. He suggested that ‘people have been chasing the Prime Minister since he was mayor and before’, adding ‘people have been gunning for him for some time.’ Yes, because it was those dastardly hacks who introduced lockdown and then broke into No. 10 and took all those pictures. As Theresa May’s former pollster James Johnson points out, the main reason that Wakefield’s swing voters chose Labour was: ‘Boris Johnson tried to cover up partygate, and lied to the public’, followed by ‘Boris Johnson is not in touch with working-class people.’

Has anyone else in government got any better lines for No. 10’s hapless spokesmen? If so, send them to Conservative Campaign HQ on 4 Matthew Parker St, London, SW1H 9HQ as a matter of urgency…

Tories shouldn’t bin Boris yet

If only they had waited until today. Had Tory MPs cleared the threshold for a confidence vote in Boris Johnson this morning – amid the smouldering embers of two blazing by-election defeats – rather than earlier in the month, then he would surely be toast.

As it is, all that the Prime Minister’s many critics in the Conservative parliamentary party can do is seethe and wait a while for another opportunity to topple him.

As someone determined to continue in office, Johnson is able to do so unchallenged until 6 June, 2023, absent of an emergency change in 1922 Committee rules. Some Tory MPs will now push for such a change. Indeed 1922 Executive member Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown has already gone public with the suggestion that there will be an imminent discussion about the case for it.

A wiser course would be to leave the current rule in place but start engaging in some prudent succession planning. Because next June has long seemed about the optimum time for the Tories to decide who should lead them into the next general election.

To make a change now via a second ruthless putsch against Johnson just weeks after he survived an initial one, would surely create a lasting legacy of bitterness in Tory ranks. It would also parachute a successor almost unknown to the public into an extremely grim political context full of problems that appear intractable in the short-term, including a major land war in Europe and an acute cost-of-living crisis.

Such a move would risk tarnishing that person well before a general election expected at some point in 2024. Indeed, there is no guarantee that making a change when no outstanding or heavyweight alternative to Johnson can be identified would do anything other than tip the Conservatives deeper into an inescapable downward spiral.

Those Conservative MPs motivated mainly by a desire to keep their own seats but with a secondary wish to punish Johnson for his lockdown excesses would be well advised to do something even crueller than deposing him now: keeping him on for a year to soak up all the bad news.

The likelihood is that by the end of next spring he will be more unpopular than he is now, primarily as a result of plunging living standards rather than his penchant for a party or inconsistent relationship with the truth. Yet the economic outlook could by then be on the verge of improving as inflationary pressures start to ease. That would be the most opportune moment to make a change, giving a successor a decent chance of proving a hit with the public.

Given that every new prime minister in recent times has enjoyed an initial honeymoon period – even wooden public performers such as Gordon Brown and Theresa May – the Conservatives could then have two possible plays to retain power. The first would be a snap election in autumn 2023 if the polls looked favourable. The second, an on-schedule poll in the spring or autumn of 2024 following a period of sound and stable governing. That’s the logical analysis anyway.

Yet in politics logic does not always carry the day. The biggest initial consequence of the loss of Wakefield in the face of an underwhelming swing to Labour and of Tiverton and Honiton in the face of a spectacular one to the Lib Dems is the resignation today of Oliver Dowden as Tory chairman.

His resignation letter is notable for its lack of any statement of continued confidence in the Prime Minister, as well as being laced with menacing observations such as: ‘Our supporters are distressed and disappointed by recent events’, ‘We cannot carry on with business as usual’ and “Somebody must take responsibility’.

This is the first Cabinet resignation prompted directly by the impact Johnson’s personal reputational woes are having on Tory fortunes (that of Lord Frost being provoked by concerns over the direction of policy).

If other Cabinet ministers have reached the conclusion that not only is Johnson now electoral kryptonite, but that he is incapable of governing sensibly from day to day as well, then all bets are off about how long he might last.

One thing seems certain: the Tory conference at the start of October will be turned into a beauty pageant for the politically ugly. Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary who struggles to convey authority; Priti Patel, the Home Secretary who cannot send a single irregular migrant to Rwanda; Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor who has in effect already had to deliver three Budgets this year as he struggles to keep pace with economic events. Perhaps Nadhim Zahawi and Ben Wallace, who both have real achievements to their name – the former over Covid inoculations and the latter over Ukraine – will become the two bald men fighting over Johnson’s unused comb.

But having moved against Johnson too early once already, his internal opponents making the same mistake again is the biggest risk to Tory prospects now. A year down the line his electoral viability, or lack of it, will be a settled matter. And a potential saviour may also have emerged.

What will the anti-Boris rebels do now?

Looking at these Tory losses, it is hard not to conclude that the rebels would have got the 180 votes they needed to oust Boris Johnson if they had been organised enough to wait until after the by-elections before going for a vote of no confidence. But having had a vote two weeks ago, it is not credible to suggest changing the rules immediately to allow another one.

However, judging from the conversations I have had with Tory MPs this morning, more of them would now like the option of having another vote sooner than a year from now. Some talk about the autumn, others about March. In a way, Oliver Dowden’s resignation is so devastating because no one thinks that it was tactical campaigning errors by Conservative Campaign Headquarters that led to these defeats. You can’t look at a swing of close to 30 per cent in Tiverton, the kind of place you would describe as the quintessence of Tory England, and say that better canvassing might have made the difference. It is clear that, as even those loyal to him concede, Boris Johnson is motivating the anti-Tory vote more than the Tory one right now.

The new executive of the 1922 Committee will be elected before parliament goes down for the summer and while I doubt that people will campaign on an explicit platform of changing the rules, I suspect that MPs will be inclined to vote for those they think are more likely to agree to do that. The upshot of this will be a committee on which there will probably be a majority for changing the rules if the circumstances require it.

Is Boris heading for a 1997 moment?

Why was the Tory defeat in 1997 so heavy? One of the reasons was that the anti-Tory vote tended to coalesce around the candidate most likely to defeat the Tory in each place. Tactical voting in 1997 cost the Tories 30 seats, turning a bad defeat into a catastrophe.

Last night provides evidence that this is happening again, that in British politics there are now two blocs, the Tories and the anti-Tories. Take Tiverton. In the last two elections, Labour came second there. But in this by-election, they lost their deposit as their vote share dropped by 16 per cent. 

This isn’t because voters in rural Devon are particularly unpersuaded by Keir Starmer but because anti-Tory voters quickly realised that the Liberal Democrats had the better chance of unseating the Tories and so turned to them. In Wakefield, we also saw tactical voting – albeit on a less dramatic scale. The Lib Dem vote halved and the party also lost their deposit and got fewer votes than Richard Tice’s Reform UK.

At the moment, the polls suggest that the left bloc of the electorate – Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens – is around 60 per cent. If these voters vote tactically, the results will be devastating for the Tories.

One problem for the Tories is how long they have been in power, the longer you are in office the more politics splits into pro-you and anti-you. Another problem is that Boris Johnson is, at the moment, more of a motivating force for the anti-Tory vote than the Tory vote.

The question for the Tories now is how best to defuse the threat posed by tactical voting. The more they try and pump up their base with red meat policies, the more they risk polarising voters at large and eliciting a tactical voting response.

As Tory MPs think about what to do next and whether they should change the rules to allow another no-confidence vote, I suspect the question of how to try and reduce tactical voting will be one of the things foremost in their mind.

Tune in to this special episode of Spectator TV discussing the by-election with Fraser Nelson, James Forsyth and Cindy Yu:

By-election results in six graphs

Last night’s by-elections in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton have proved disastrous for the Tories. Labour took Wakefield by 4,925 votes – a swing of almost 13 per cent. The Liberal Democrats meanwhile put another dent in the ‘blue wall’ taking Tiverton by 6,144 and achieving a massive 30 per cent swing.

The Tiverton and Honiton result highlights the trouble Boris’s government finds itself in. The seat has been Conservative – and with a large majority – since its creation in 1997. But even before that seats in the area had been Tory since Queen Victoria was on the throne.

Turnout was well below general election levels. In Wakefield, just 39 per cent bothered to vote – the lowest ever in the seat. In Tiverton and Honiton it was 52 per cent – also the lowest since the seat’s creation. It’s never had a turnout below 69 per cent before.

It looks as though tactical voting played a key part. With Lib Dem voters lending their ballots to Labour in Wakefield and Labour returning the favour in Tiverton and Honiton.

Despite the results, Labour’s overall poll lead is not huge. The Spectator’s poll tracker puts it at just seven percentage points. A single-digit poll deficit is not bad for a government well into its midterm. One recent poll even puts Boris ahead of Keir Starmer on who would make the best Prime Minister.

But as James Forsyth points out in his Coffee House piece this morning the polling average for a possible ‘left bloc’ is gaining momentum. Taken together, Labour the Lib Dems, Greens and the SNP are polling above 60 per cent.