Boris johnson

As the Tory tribe prepares to gather in Manchester, the chatter is about two things: who will succeed David Cameron and what will happen in the EU referendum. These two issues are, obviously, inextricably linked. If Britain votes Out in the EU referendum, a prospect which while still unlikely has become more likely in recent weeks, Cameron is unlikely to be succeeded by someone who campaigned for In—as Fraser points out in the Telegraph today. But, so far, none of the expected leadership candidates have indicated that they will campaign for Out. George Osborne is one of the lead figures in the renegotiation and has always been clear that he

When David Cameron announced that he wouldn’t serve a third term, he made it inevitable that Westminster would spend much of his second term wondering about who would succeed him. Well, in the new Spectator, Nicky Morgan becomes the first Cabinet Minister to make clear that she is interested in standing when Cameron steps down. She says that ‘A lot of it will depend on family’ but makes clear that she believes there needs to be a female candidate in the race and hopes ‘that, in the not too distant future, there will be another female leader of a main Westminster political party’. What I was most struck about when

With Lord Ashcroft’s claim in today’s Daily Mail that David Cameron once enjoyed intimate relations with a dead pig, talk has soon turned to which unnamed Tory MP was the source of the story. With the incident allegedly taking place at an initiation ceremony for the Piers Gaveston dining society – which is named after Edward II’s alleged male lover — it has been suggested that one of Cameron’s Oxford university contemporaries could be the source. While Steerpike is yet to discover which MP is behind the Ashcroft tale, Mr S couldn’t help but remember that one Tory MP previously got himself into trouble for telling porkies concerning Piers Gaveston. When Boris Johnson was

One Boris supporter asked me this week, ‘How bad do you think things are?’ The thing under discussion, it quickly turned out, was Boris’s leadership prospects. Among his camp followers, there is growing concern that Boris is being left behind in the leadership race. The Mayor’s chances have certainly taken a knock in recent months. First, the Tories winning a majority exploded the argument that they needed someone with Boris’s ‘beyond politics’ appeal to win outright. Then, Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader changed the calculation about the 2020 election for the Tories. Suddenly, a safety first approach – eg a non-Boris one – seems much more appealing. But there are

Heathrow expansion is one key policy area that is affected by the recent Labour elections. Sadiq Khan’s victory in the London mayoral nomination contest means that the London Labour party will be campaigning against a third runway. Tessa Jowell was tentatively pro-Heathrow but Khan made a pledge during the campaign to oppose a third runway — one that he would find it very hard to renege on. And assuming the bookies are right and Zac Goldsmith is selected as the Conservative candidate, all of the London mayoral candidates will be campaigning against Heathrow expansion (the Greens and Lib Dems are also likely to be against it). The Labour party overall is heading in an anti-Heathrow

Boris Johnson’s war with black cab drivers stepped up a notch today. His monthly Mayor’s Question Time session was abruptly shut down after cabbies packed out the public gallery of London City Hall to protest about what they see as Transport for London’s unfair regulations for Uber. As the video above shows, Johnson’s description of the cabbies as ‘Luddites’ did not go down well at all and the London Assembly’s deputy chair decided it should end. Steve McNamara, general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association, has told the Evening Standard Boris’s ‘Luddite’ was to blame, saying it was not ‘the smartest of moves but it escalated out of all proportion’. The fracas

An excerpt from Anthony Seldon’s David Cameron biography claimed that George Osborne finds his Tory leadership rival Boris Johnson ‘plain annoying‘. Happily the pair put any differences aside today as the Chancellor of the Exchequer paid a visit to Johnson’s constituency. The happy duo visited the Battle of Britain Bunker in Uxbridge to see how a £1m investment will help to restore the historic site. This bunker, if you remember, was the one Osborne joking referred to in the Budget when he said ‘I want to thank the member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip for bringing to my attention the dilapidated state of his campaign bunker’. The Mayor invited Osborne to

A Jeremy Corbyn victory in the Labour leadership race now seems like a racing certainty. The consequences of this for Labour have been much discussed but in the magazine this week, I look at what it would mean for the Tories. The first, and most obvious, thing to say is that it would make 2020 the Tories’ election to lose — and they would have to make an epoch defining mistake to do so. But some Tories are worried about the prospect of a Corbyn victory. This isn’t just because they fear that bad opposition leads to bad government. But because they fret that Cameron and Osborne’s response to it will

Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon’s biography of David Cameron has not even been released yet but already it has managed to send ripples through Westminster. Revelations in the Mail on Sunday’s excerpt of the tome included George Osborne’s fears that an EU referendum could obstruct his path to Number 10, as well as a text David Cameron sent to Boris Johnson apparently telling him to ‘f—ing shut up‘. Only it may be best to take some of these stories with a pinch of salt for now, as concerns begin to grow regarding the accuracy of Seldon and Snowdon’s account. While Lord Ashcroft revealed earlier this year that Seldon was getting Number 10 aides to

Oh dear. Although Lord Ashcroft said he would be pleasantly surprised if Anthony Seldon’s biography of David Cameron offered anything more than ‘a sanitised account’ of his time in Number 10, an excerpt in today’s Mail on Sunday should make interesting reading for Boris Johnson. In Cameron at 10, Seldon writes of tensions between the leadership hopeful and the Cameron camp, which culminated in the Prime Minister telling Johnson to ‘f—ing shut up’ ahead of the election after he listed all the Old Etonians who had gone on to make it into Number 10: ‘One Number 10 insider says: ‘There was a sense in this building that the PM and Chancellor were getting on taking the

How do the Tories win over low-income workers for good? That’s the question occupying the mind of anyone seriously thinking about the 2020 election, rather than assuming that Jeremy Corbyn will win it for them. Today Boris Johnson turned his hand to answering that question in an eloquent and detailed speech which set out his stall on social mobility. Of course, every speech at the moment is viewed as part of the leadership contest, and given Boris hasn’t had a particularly stellar first term in the Commons, this speech did appear to be partly a reminder that he hasn’t gone away at all. In fact, it was a fine speech