Conservative party

It’s been a rough few months for the Conservatives so last night’s launch of Freer made a welcome change. Cabinet ministers and MPs gathered to celebrate the new initiative intended to promote a freer society and a freer economy. Or, Liz Truss’s leadership ambitions, depending which way you look at it. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury – and rising social media star – gave a lively speech at the Conrad hotel to kickstart the project. Truss entertained the crowd with anecdotes from her time as a young Conservative, plans to win over younger voters and criticism of a ‘po-faced’ opposition: Truss’s early years: ‘They don’t want to be told what

Today the Conservatives gather for the party’s Spring Forum. The annual two-day event is intended to rally the party as they prepare for the year ahead. However, with troublesome local elections around the corner, it won’t be all cheer. Happily, the Conservatives’ No 1 celebrity supporter has found the time to join them… at least in spirit. Jungle queen Georgia – ‘Toff’ – Toffolo has spoken to the crowd via video link: With Conservative chiefs previously blocking proposals to bring Toff into the fold, it seems that the pro-Toff wing of the party has won.

The single most important domestic policy decision that the Conservatives must take is what to do about public spending. After the snap election went so wrong last year, many Tories rushed to blame ‘austerity’. Gavin Barwell, now Theresa May’s chief of staff, said this was one of the principal reasons he had lost his Croydon Central seat. Even the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, admitted that the public was weary of the long slog to balance the books. This belief — that the public has had enough of austerity — explains why the Tories aren’t behaving as governments traditionally do. Normally, they make tough fiscal choices in the early years of a

There are many things the Conservative party needs to do before it is election fit – whether local or national. There’s securing a good Brexit deal, building more homes and repairing the damage done in the snap election – to name a few. As I write in today’s i paper, one of the big things brains at CCHQ are currently working on is firing up the party’s campaign machine. While the Tories don’t have a problem attracting party donors, they do have a problem getting people out door-knocking. One of the many missteps Theresa May made last year was catching her own party’s campaign machine off guard with her decision to

It’s fair to say that the Conservatives’ attempts to use the allegations about Jeremy Corbyn’s links with a Czechoslovakian spy have had mixed results. The high point came when Theresa May managed to produce a joke about blank cheques and Czechs at this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, and everything else has been competing to be the low point, from Steve Baker’s deeply awful interview on the Daily Politics, to Ben Bradley receiving a letter from Corbyn’s lawyers. Perhaps there could have been a slightly less ham-fisted way of engaging with the story. Or perhaps it would be better for the Tory party’s dignity, if nothing else, if it left these

Theresa May’s MPs are now constantly pressuring her to come up with a ‘vision’ of what she wants to do, whether it be on Brexit or on the domestic front. Those who are more sympathetic to the Prime Minister’s caution, though, argue that her vision is constrained by the parliamentary arithmetic. Why try something that just isn’t going to get through the House of Commons? One answer would be that May wouldn’t lose all that much by trying and failing than she thinks. As I wrote last week, she is currently more in danger of weakening her authority by not trying at all. But another is that the Prime Minister

It’s not a good sign when a party finishes the week with MPs making the same complaints as they did at the start. Yet that is where the Conservatives are now, with the malcontents still fretting that there is no sense of vision or authority from the leadership. One thing that has changed is that the Tory party now seems rather more noticeably split over how MPs should be behaving. There is the camp who say, either privately or publicly, that Theresa May should go because things are only going to get worse under her leadership. But then there are others who are furious with anyone agitating for a change

Despite having to answer questions about whether or not she is a ‘quitter’, Theresa May must be reasonably glad that she’s got a few days’ escape from her domestic agenda while she is visiting China. But being away does mean that she has left her party to stew without her, and it’s not clear that those around her are doing much to calm things down. Over the past few days, I’ve spoken to a range of Conservative backbenchers and ministers who either privately or publicly hold concerns about the way May is leading (or isn’t, as the case may be). All agree that things are rather critical for the Prime

Can Theresa May really solve the latest crisis affecting her leadership? Previously, her survival owed a great deal to Conservative backbenchers, who vowed to protect her against a badly-behaved Cabinet, but everyone is restless now. So what can she do? The Prime Minister isn’t going to have a personality transplant, but this doesn’t mean that she is destined to continue doing absolutely nothing. She may never be able to conjure up small talk with her own MPs, but she has in the past shown that she can make bold decisions (the snap election was, admittedly, a bad example of this) and have a reforming zeal. The absence of any activity

Since Georgia ‘Toff’ Toffolo won I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, the Conservatives have been left with a dilemma over whether to utilise their celebrity supporter. A proud Conservative, Toff kindly volunteered to utilise her million followers for the party only for brains at CCHQ to block any such move over concerns she’s ‘too posh to win over Labour supporters’. Although the Conservative consensus has since changed in favour of bringing her into the tent, it seems it may be a case of too little, too late. In an interview with Sunday Times Style magazine, Toff comes across a little bit disgruntled about her recent interactions with the

‘We take the view that while things are bloody awful, we don’t want to risk making things worse.’ That is how one senior Tory backbencher sums up the mood of the parliamentary party. No one disputes that the Conservatives are in the doldrums. There is no wind in the government’s sails. No. 10 doesn’t know where it wants to take the country. This general sense of drift is interrupted by the occasional squall. The latest storm was caused by Nick Boles’s criticism of Theresa May. On Friday evening, the former housing minister took to Twitter to lament the lack of a radical government agenda and to tell the Prime Minister

With the new Tory vice-chairman for youth, Ben Bradley, currently making headlines for ill-judged blog posts from 2012, it’s safe to say that Theresa May’s plan to revamp CCHQ by appointing 13 MPs as vice-chairs, hasn’t gone entirely to plan. However, one vice chairman is determined to make a success of her brief – no matter the cost. Step forward Kemi Badenoch. The MP for Saffron Walden has been put in charge of selecting Conservative candidates for the 2022 general election. However, in this week’s edition of The House magazine, Badenoch reveals that her first task consisted of knocking a white public schoolboy off the list. Only it wasn’t any white

If you thought the main fallout from Theresa May’s reshuffle was last week, think again: over the past few days the Conservatives have been appointing their parliamentary private secretaries, which means the reshuffle has only just about ground to a halt. These PPS jobs are unpaid but count as government payroll, meaning the MP in question must be loyal to the government as well as carrying a minister’s bag around. The problem is that not every ambitious MP can be made a PPS. Worse, not every PPS can be made a minister, which means that there are a fair few Tory backbenchers and PPSs swirling around who are feeling a

What is Michael Gove up to? The Environment Secretary seems to be on a tree-hugging rampage at the moment, announcing a new green measure every week. Not content with unveiling the Tories’ 25 year environment plan last week, Gove has given an interview to today’s Sunday Times in which he attacks the water companies for using tax havens. The water companies are interesting enough, given Jeremy Corbyn has called for them to be renationalised. But what’s really revealing about what Gove’s overall mission is comes later in the interview, when he says: ‘Brexit creates opportunities, particularly in my area. Brexit could be the catalyst for some of the biggest, boldest

Ben Bradley had an inkling that his first week back at work wasn’t going to be an ordinary one when he received a text at 7am on Monday. The MP for Mansfield was summoned to 10 Downing Street for 11.30am with no explanation as to why. Given that this was the day Theresa May was expected to reshuffle her Cabinet, it was an odd request for an MP who had been in Parliament for less than a year, after taking the seat from Labour in the snap election. ‘I thought if it’s health, I’m not sure if I want it,’ Bradley jokes. He did, however, begin to put two and

With Theresa May’s reshuffle now complete, a consensus is forming that it’s been a rather underwhelming rearranging of the deck chairs. All the big beasts remain in place and some junior ministers appear to have been moved from their briefs just for the sake of moving them. Matters weren’t helped by a shambolic roll out which saw Chris Grayling falsely announced on Twitter as the new party chairman – and reports of disarray with ministers refusing to budge thanks to hacks tweeting the time each had spent in Downing Street. It’s clear that no-one in No 10 has mastered the art of completing a reshuffle in the digital age. As

Brexit could split the Tory party. So many people wrote articles arguing this before and after David Cameron called the EU referendum, but it was generally assumed that the split would involve disgruntled eurosceptics claiming they had been betrayed after Britain voted to stay in the bloc after all. It was also generally assumed that the split would at least involve something quite serious. But today MPs are locked in a war of words over whether or not they should get a ‘meaningful’ vote on the final Brexit deal. Those in favour defeated the government last night: Theresa May’s first serious Commons defeat since the snap election. Stephen Hammond was