Conservative party

Friday

Frank Young

The Conservative Party needs to be the party of family once again

Earlier this week, academics at Oxford and Cambridge were likely to be cock-a-hoop that their universities top international leagues tables taking both gold and silver spots. Britain leads the world when it comes to getting top places in international league tables of higher education. As a country, we sell TV shows across the globe and are cultural leaders pushing our soft cultural power; the Premier League is the most watched football league in the world; the City of London is the money capital of the world. Unfortunately, there are things we are less good at. In another league table published recently, Britain sits pretty much rock bottom when it comes to

Thursday

James Forsyth

May’s exit strategy

Nearly all Tory MPs now agree Theresa May should stay on as Prime Minister. She must get the party through Brexit, they say. A leadership contest now would risk splitting the party over the European issue. One senior Tory who was agitating to depose May back in July has told me that he has now decided it would be best if she stays until 2019. But this desire to keep her in place for Brexit should not be confused (especially not by Mrs May) with a desire to see her fight the next election. The number of Tories prepared to even contemplate following her into another battle remains vanishingly small.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

How Theresa May plans to sneak policies past MPs

If Theresa May is in it for the ‘long term’, does this mean that she plans to do big things with her premiership? The Prime Minister promised a great deal when she stood on the steps of Downing Street over a year ago, but has so far delivered a snap election which messed up her chances of actually achieving what she promised. She now has to rely on a party which doesn’t share all of her values – the DUP – or the good will of Labour MPs who happen to support what she wants to do. But this is all about May’s weakness in the House of Commons Chamber.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Senior Tories oddly supportive of Theresa May’s plan to stay

Theresa May’s announcement that she plans to serve as Prime Minister for ‘the long term’ has come as rather a surprise to her party. Cabinet ministers and senior backbenchers had hoped that all the talk of her sell-by-date and a leadership contest would have faded in time for the autumn, but this has stirred it up again. There are two schools of thought in the party as to whether the Prime Minister went into her interview yesterday intending to give a stronger line on whether or not she was going to leave. By and large those who are most unimpressed by the way she has led up to this point

Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Theresa May’s vow to fight the next election changes nothing

Theresa May’s ability to survive the summer has emboldened her to stay on in Downing Street and fight the next election. That, at least, is what is being read into the Prime Minister’s remarks during her trip to Japan that she is in it ‘for the long term’. In fact, while it might seem that another dose of mountain air has strengthened the PM’s resolve, little has changed about May’s plan for the future. And by saying that she isn’t quitting any time soon, the PM is just stating the obvious. In the days after the election, Theresa May told MPs: I will serve as long as you want me.

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

May’s opponents are the mad and the bad

I first met Theresa May, or met her properly, way back in the last century. I’d been invited to speak at a constituency dinner for Maidenhead Conservatives on a Saturday night, and sat at her table. She was with her husband, Philip; I remember only my suspicion that he didn’t desperately want to be there. Of her I remember the pallor, and a certain shyness; but the couple were pleasant and welcoming to me, and as I’m not one to pump people for political news and gossip, and she isn’t one to volunteer such things, this was not the sort of evening that would have prompted an entry in the

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Theresa May’s great comeback is now underway

Theresa May has always made her holidays sound as sensible and lacking in exoticism as she is. But something strange happens to the Prime Minister when she takes a break. After her last break, she decided she wanted a snap election. Now she’s back from the three-week holiday that was supposed to help the Conservative party calm down, and she’s declaring that she is here ‘for the long term’ and that she does want to fight the next election for the Conservatives. Her colleagues had urged her to take a long break this summer. They might now start getting a little suspicious when their leader next starts talking about some

Tuesday

Ed West

The Tories need houses, not memes, to win over the young

The Tory party has a new youth wing called Activate to try to win over the kids with ‘memes’ – I believe they’re called – similar to the way that Momentum has built a sort of cult around Jeremy Corbyn. This is in response to the dismal recent Conservative youth vote, which bodes ill for the party. As a party member rather optimistically put it, ‘we’ll only be fine when a Conservative politician can go to Glastonbury and not be booed’. Yeah, I wouldn’t be too hopeful on that one to be honest. Among the under-40s there is an almost visceral dislike of Tories and Toryism, which stems from a number of

Sunday

Paul Goodman

How the Conservatives can win back young voters

Election day polling by Michael Ashcroft showed a Britain divided not so much by class or region as age. The 45-54 age group split almost evenly between the two main parties. Older voters went for the Conservatives; younger ones for Labour. Among 18-24 year olds, only 18 per cent voted Tory, while 67 per cent supported Labour. Among 24-35 year olds, that first figure rose to only 22 per cent and the second dropped to only 58 per cent. It is inevitable in the aftermath of these findings and June’s result that the Conservatives should mull younger voters’ embrace of Jeremy Corbyn; think that the latter have little grasp, because

Thursday

Katy Balls

The phoney Tory leadership war

When a new MP is offered a job as a parliamentary private secretary for a cabinet member, it’s often a test to see if they really would do anything to get into government. It involves running errands, spying on colleagues, ferrying messages around the Commons and planting inane questions for backbenchers to ask in the chamber. But in this hung Parliament, another duty has been added to those of the Tory PPS: to report anyone who might look as if they’re running for leadership. The Tory whips’ office has asked every PPS to inform them if any minister is behaving suspiciously — giving grand speeches about the state of the

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Ruth Davidson is on manoeuvres. What is she playing at?

So Ruth Davidson, honorary colonel in the signals reserve, is on manoeuvres again. It is past time, the leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party says, for the government to rethink its approach to immigration. Time, instead, for an adult debate on the subject at the end of which, she hopes, the government will rethink its obstinate insistence on treating immigration as nothing more than a numbers game. And since the government keeps missing its targets on immigration, perhaps it would be sensible to revise those targets? At the very least, she says, it is absurd to insist that foreign undergraduates should be counted as immigrants when the public

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

Parliament’s new tribe | 5 August 2017

Politics is such a fickle game that it’s perfectly acceptable to believe six impossible things before breakfast without ever having to apologise for being so wrong. Remember, for instance, when everyone was predicting that the dead cert increased majority for Theresa May would lead to the creation of a new party? Perhaps, like everyone else who has since gone on to predict another series of impossible things with equal confidence, it’s easier for us to forget those old certainties. No one talks about a new party any more. The facts have changed, so we’ve changed our minds too. There aren’t the same conditions for that proposed new party about which

Friday

Steerpike

Ruth Davidson mocks Theresa May

Theresa May made herself something of a laughing stock during the general election when she was asked what was the naughtiest thing she had ever done. The Prime Minister said her defining act of mischief was running through a field of wheat. Her answer earned her plenty of stick, not least from her political opponents. Now, it’s her allies who are pointing and laughing. With the PM on holiday in Switzerland, Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson has ridiculed Theresa May by running through a field of wheat herself: Mr S thinks that with friends like that, who needs enemies?  

Thursday

James Delingpole

No true Tory can support this gender idiocy

I’ve had it with the Conservatives. For me, and I know I’m not the only one, the final straw was the announcement at the weekend that the Equalities Minister Justine Greening wants to change the law so that people are free to specify their gender on their birth certificate regardless of medical opinion. What were they thinking, Greening and the various senior party bods who supported this decision, including, apparently, the Prime Minister? Actually, I think we can guess. They were thinking: ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn. His young followers seem to like this LBGBLT — how do the initials go again? — malarkey so perhaps we’d better get with it too.’

Steerpike Steerpike

Heidi Allen’s independent approach raises questions

Since Theresa May lost her Tory majority in the snap election, few of her MPs have been more critical of the Prime Minister than Heidi Allen. The MP for South Cambridgeshire has predicted that May will be gone within six months – and said in a speech in the Commons that she could ‘barely put into words’ her anger at her party’s deal with the DUP. Is Allen now distancing herself from the party? There is no mention of the Conservative party in Allen’s Twitter bio, and now her attendance at this year’s Tory conference is up in the air. The Tory MP tells Bright Blue, the Conservative think tank, that

Thursday

The Spectator

Let May govern

It used to be said that loyalty was the Conservatives’ secret weapon. While other parties might descend into internecine warfare, the Tories would always, when circumstances demanded, show just enough respect for their leader. The words ‘loyalty’ and ‘Conservative’, -however, lost their natural affinity during the Major years. Since then, to borrow a phrase from the left, the leadership of the party has descended into a state of permanent revolution. After the failure of her general election campaign, Theresa May seems to have become a tortured prisoner of her cabinet. Talks of leaks are exaggerated. It’s quite true that our political editor, James Forsyth, was able to disclose a row

James Forsyth James Forsyth

The Tories need a ‘what’ as much as a ‘who’

Theresa May has made it to the summer. In the aftermath of the election, Downing Street’s immediate aim was to get the Prime Minister to the parliamentary recess. On Thursday they succeeded. They think that the next six weeks will give the government a much-needed chance to regroup and catch its breath. Like a cricket team playing for the close, they hope conditions will be more favourable when proceedings resume. But is there any reason to think that things will be different in September? The summer break can do many things but it can’t conjure up another 20 Tory MPs or put time on the Brexit clock. Tory optimists claim

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Dear Leavebugs, it’s time to admit your mistake

‘Brexit,’ says my friend David Aaronovitch, ‘is dying.’ We Remainer irreconcilables certainly hope so. But there’s a slim chance the grisly Brexit project could yet pull through, and it’s right to acknowledge this. So in a spirit of candid friendship I write this letter to die-hard Leavers, of whom a small — but vigorous — colony survives on these Spectator pages… Dear Leavebugs, You know I am not of your number, but I understand you. I even feel for you. The Leave/Remain split is not a divide between two halves of the British population, but a war within the breast of each person. Every feeling you’ve had, I’ve experienced too.

Sunday

James Delingpole

Let’s keep up the Moggmentum | 16 July 2017

‘We need to talk about why the internet is falling in love with Jacob Rees-Mogg, because it’s not OK,’ warns a recent post on the Corbynista website The Canary. Its anxiety is not misplaced. Polite, eloquent, witty, well-informed, coherent, principled — Jacob Rees-Mogg is the antithesis of almost every-thing the Labour party stands for under its current populist leadership. And far from putting off voters, it seems to be a winning formula. Even sections of the elusive and generally very left-wing youth vote appear to be warming to the idea that our next prime minister shouldn’t be (alleged) man-of-the-people Corbyn but yet another plummy, Old Etonian millionaire… This ought to

Saturday

Andrew Marr

Who will be the next Tory leader?

Who will be the next Tory leader? I keep asking the senior contenders over breakfast after the show or at those now notorious summer parties. And they all say the same thing: she will stay for a couple of years and then it will be somebody we haven’t thought of yet. It’s already too late, they say, for MPs in their 50s and 60s. Predicting politics these days is like juggling greased goldfish… but I pass this on for what it’s worth. This is an extract from Andrew Marr’s Diary, which appears in this week’s Spectator