Conservative party

Nearly two years on from the general election and 11 years since the Tories took office, they remain comfortably and consistently ahead in the polls. This is remarkable. In September 2008, when Labour was in power, it was almost 20 points behind the Conservative party. Eighteen years before that, when the Tories were in power, they regularly trailed by double digits. You might think this Tory lead, and the poor numbers for the leader of the opposition — Keir Starmer’s latest approval rating is minus 39 — would have led to Tory triumphalism. However, when Tory MPs return to parliament next week, they will do so in a strikingly subdued

Marwa al-Sabouni is a Syrian architect who watched her home city of Homs destroyed during the Syrian conflict between 2011 and 2014. Out of that experience, she penned an  intensely moving and haunting account of what the idea of home means. She writes of how the dwellings we live in are intimately connected with our own sense of self: ‘Our homes don’t just contain our life earnings, they stand for what we are. To destroy one’s home should be taken as an equal crime to destroying one’s soul.’ It’s a statement that echoes the biblical vision of every person able to ‘live in safety, under their own vine and under their

One of the enduring charms of British politics is how slight the pecuniary rewards are for taking up the job of prime minister. American presidents can look forward to stonking great advances on their memoirs. (Barack and Michelle Obama received a joint up-front payment of £47 million from Crown publishing group.) They claim rock-star appearance fees in exchange for a few platitudes to sandalled Silicon Valley execs. (Bill and Hillary Clinton raked in £110 million in speaking fees between 2001 and 2015.) A stint in the White House boosted George H W Bush’s net worth by 475 per cent and Richard Nixon’s by 650 per cent, pocket change compared to

The Westminster rumour mill is in overdrive today on the question of whether Rishi Sunak will be Boris Johnson’s successor in No. 10. It’s not that there’s a job vacancy. Instead, the first ConservativeHome poll on who Tory members would like to be the party’s next leader has put Sunak out on top, with International Trade secretary Liz Truss in second and Cabinet Office minister Penny Mordaunt a close third. The poll isn’t exactly helpful timing for the Chancellor. Given the weekend papers were filled with stories of Sunak calling on Johnson to relax travel rules, anything that fuels talk of leadership manoeuvres is problematic for No. 11.  However, the poll that

Last week there was acute concern in government about the country’s re-opening. Would restrictions need to be reimposed when schools return in September? Ministers fretted. But those nerves have now been replaced by cautious optimism. Case numbers have been falling for a week straight and it increasingly looks as if this wave has peaked. No one in Downing Street wants to declare mission accomplished. What will happen to the numbers when people’s fear of being ‘pinged’ by Test and Trace eases and they start to socialise more? Cases need to be falling consistently between now and schools returning. Privately, scientists are stressing risks remain. They warn that there is still

When you ask a government minister why something hasn’t happened, you get a one-word answer: ‘Covid’. It has become the catch-all excuse for manifesto promises not materialising. But in the case of social care, there is a particular truth to it. A meeting last week between the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Health Secretary nearly resulted in an agreed policy. A plan was expected this week. Then Sajid Javid tested positive for Covid, putting the three into isolation and the policy on hold. Johnson feels he needs a solution to social care, having promised to solve the issue when he became PM two years ago and again in the

Modern pragmatist political leaders are generally keen to reassure us that there is a unifying philosophy to be found running through their mish-mash of measures. In reality, perhaps they are keenest of all to reassure themselves of it. Tony Blair had the ‘Third Way’ and David Cameron the ‘Big Society’. Boris Johnson has ‘levelling-up’. But despite the largely hostile political class reviews being rolled out on Thursday in response to his speech on the latter, Johnson’s formulation is actually far more readily understandable than those of his predecessors. Many of you will vaguely recall that the Third Way was something to do with synthesising right-of-centre economics and left-of-centre social policy

We will shortly find out who has been elected as the leader of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee after incumbent Sir Graham Brady faced a challenge from Heather Wheeler. I’m told that turnout in the election for the chair was over 90 per cent and that counting has just begun. Rather than emitting white smoke, the committee is notifying the two candidates of the result by text message. Brady has been at the helm since 2010 and has generally been considered a reliable figure in representing the views of backbenchers to the Prime Minister. But Wheeler’s pitch — which critics say is supportive of Boris Johnson to the point that

Covid restrictions are meant to end on 19 July. But parliament will not return to normal until September. The Commons goes into recess on 22 July and there’s no desire in government to end proxy voting for the dregs of the session. The chief whip has told colleagues that he might struggle to get MPs to come to Westminster for just the last three days of term. The Commons chamber has been a strange place during the pandemic: less bear pit, more petting zoo. Since so few MPs have been allowed in, it has been far harder for them to persuade their colleagues by force of argument or to put

If a vote is called on the government’s aid cut on Monday, it will be very tight for the government. Andrew Mitchell is a former chief whip as well as a former development secretary and it is hard to believe that he would have put this amendment down if he didn’t have the numbers to defeat the government. This is, in some ways, an odd rebellion. The rebels claim they are not really rebels at all and just trying to uphold the Tory manifesto from the last election. But the size of this rebellion should concern Boris Johnson and the Tory whips. It highlights how many former ministers there now

The Conservatives will be relieved that an independent investigation has not found the party to be institutionally racist, though relief is about all they can feel. Professor Swaran Singh’s report, which has taken two years to arrive, paints a picture of a party at best complacent about how its members talk about Muslims.  Professor Singh examined 1,418 complaints about 727 incidents between 2015 and 2020, of which two-thirds were allegations of anti-Muslim discrimination and three-quarters were from social media. The former commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) concludes that: Anti-Muslim sentiment has been evidenced at local association and individual levels, as demonstrated by a number of social

It is often said that most Conservative MPs have a highly ‘transactional’ relationship with Boris Johnson. The inference is that in an ideal world they would not choose to be led by someone they regard as having far too many foibles and shortcomings and will only tolerate him being PM while he continues to be a winner. The Times political commentator Rachel Sylvester set this out fluently during an appearance on Channel 4 News at the height of the ‘curtaingate’ affair last month. ‘The danger for Boris Johnson is if MPs feel he is no longer a winner they will turn on him,’ she said, adding that she had been

Keir Starmer has turned a drama into a crisis. The local elections were always going to be difficult for Labour. The government is enjoying the political dividend of the vaccine rollout, and approval for its handling of the Covid crisis is now back to where it was a month into the first national lockdown. Much of the world is still struggling, but Britain has the lowest Covid levels in Europe and Boris Johnson’s approval rating is far higher as a result. He triumphed, and Labour struggled. But Starmer made this so much worse by his actions before and after polling day. The first error was to hold the Hartlepool by-election

Is ‘levelling up’ actually going to amount to anything? It’s been well over a year since Boris Johnson talked about it on the steps of Downing Street following his election victory, but of course quite a lot has happened in the intervening few months. It would be perfectly easy for this agenda to end up like David Cameron’s Big Society: with noble aims, a catchy (if also meaningless) tag line – and not much to show for it at the end. It’s fair to say that many MPs feared this too, which is one of the reasons the Northern Research Group was set up, in order to keep up pressure

Back in 2005, Boris Johnson wrote that among geopolitical gloomsters, China was becoming the ‘fashionable new dread’. They were obsessed with the idea that this ‘incubator of strange diseases’ was angling to become ‘the next world superpower’ — ‘China will not dominate the globe’ he concluded. The China question is now the most fashionable new dread in Boris Johnson’s Tory party. Within the space of a few short years, the country has gone from a mid-level concern, via Cameron and Osborne’s ‘golden era’ to becoming an existential rival. And where once the country was of interest only to a few dusty old Sinologists, now it is the cause célèbre for

Oh dear. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has not exactly been at the top of his game in recent weeks. Across the country teachers, children and parents have been thrown into turmoil by the government’s haphazard education plans, which have seen schools open up for a single day, and national exams cancelled, despite the Education Secretary’s insistence they would ‘absolutely’ go ahead. Still, Mr S hoped that Williamson would at least be clear in his mind about getting schools back open once again. Unfortunately, the minister seemed to rather struggle with that message when in Parliament today. In a statement, Williamson instead insisted that: ‘I can absolutely assure the honourable lady,

After Boris Johnson waxed lyrical about his Brexit deal in today’s Downing Street press conference, it’s now over to MPs to give their verdict. During the press conference announcing the terms of the deal agreed between the UK and EU, the Prime Minister confirmed that the government plans to put the deal to a vote on 30 December. MPs have already voiced concerns about the lack of time for proper scrutiny – and the text of the full deal (500 pages plus another 1,000 in annexes) is still to be published. But, despite this, the initial signs are promising for the government. Prior to finalising the deal this afternoon, the Prime