Conservative party

‘I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it’.  That was how George W Bush put it after winning his second presidential election in 2004. He’s possibly not the best model for good governance, but the sentiment is worth pondering as Theresa May rolls on relentlessly towards victory. Mrs May will wake on June 9 with money in the bank, politically if not fiscally. She’ll have crushed and possibly split apart the Labour Party, secured her party another five years in office and stamped and stamped and stamped her personal authority on the Conservative Party.  With every day that passes, there are more whispers that

It would be easy to dismiss Jeremy Corbyn’s launch of the Labour party’s election campaign this week on the grounds that hardly anyone believes he has the slightest chance of becoming prime minister. But given that David Cameron was given a 0.5 per cent chance of winning a majority, and Donald Trump a 1 per cent chance of the presidency, it would be foolish not to take the main opposition party seriously. At the very least, Corbyn’s ideas need to be examined in order to understand why Labour finds itself in the position it does, and why no party leader to the left of Tony Blair has won a general election

How was last night’s TV squirm-athon? The sacrificial victims handled it pretty well, at first. Theresa May and her unknown husband, Philip, were roasted live on a BBC sofa. The idea, presumably, was to make them seem relaxed, normal, unexciting, not too posh, at ease with themselves and, above all, genuine. Dull Phil sported a bland shirt, no tie, and a forgettable jacket. With his gnomish pallor and his thick-rimmed spectacles he resembled Sir Ian McKellen entering a Woody Allen lookalike contest. Mrs May was in headmistress mode. Her wandering lips – each has a life of its own – were painted in hard-Brexit scarlet. She wore a black-and-white tunic

The Tories have just hit a new high in the polls: 49 per cent, handing them a 22-point lead over Labour. This margin is virtually uncharted territory for the Conservatives, with ICM pointing out that the party’s current lead has only been bettered once in the last 34 years of polling – back in May 1983. As ever, it’s less good news for Labour: the party sits on 27 per cent, according to ICM – a number which precisely matches the share of the national vote they picked up in last week’s local elections. If – and it’s a big if – this means the pollsters have pinpointed Labour’s share of

Newspapers everywhere are in trouble, with advertising revenues down about 20 per cent a year. Local newspapers are worst hit and many are on the brink of collapse, sacking staff and pages. But there can be no more depressing sign of their distress than to see newspaper owners selling front pages to political parties. Look at the above pictures: both are designed to deceive the reader and look like genuine front pages. They’re created by Labour and Conservative spin doctors, printed as so-called “cover wrap” adverts. Sure, there’s a blink-and-you-miss-it caveat saying “political advertisement” in the Labour one (left) for the Copeland by-election, there’s hardly any branding at all. The

Twenty years ago this week Tony Blair came to power with a thumping majority, claiming Labour to be ‘the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole’. As a phrase it sounds mildly deranged but it wasn’t totally cut off from reality. New Labour had claimed support among a cross-section of the public, including over 60 per cent of DE voters and a clear majority of those in the C2D category. Today, the Conservatives have a 17-point lead among working-class voters, despite there being a squeeze on health and education spending, and the party offering not much in the way of optimism or charisma. What went right, then? Of

The recent Welsh poll showing a ten-point Conservative lead in voting intentions for the forthcoming general election (and also, though much less reported, the first ever Conservative lead in devolved voting intentions in Wales), came as a shock to many. The next Welsh poll, out next week, will tell us whether this first one was just an outlier or the more solid harbinger of an historic realignment in Welsh politics. But why should it be such a surprise that the governing party of the UK, with around a twenty-point opinion poll lead across Britain, should have a lead half that size in one particular part of Britain? The astonishment is

When my old friend – a lifelong Labour supporter – told me he was voting Tory at the election, I posted a message on Twitter: That was that, I thought. But then the replies started piling in. One of the first responses came from someone who thought my friend would regret his decision if he ever needed the NHS. ‘He’s an NHS consultant’, I replied. Even that didn’t stop the disbelief: many of those responding struggled to believe that someone working for the NHS could possibly vote Conservative. Was my friend real, they demanded to know. Admittedly not everyone thought I was making it up. Others seemed convinced that my

At midnight, we won’t have any MPs. The dissolution of Parliament means that no-one who has sat on the green benches of the Commons for the past two years has any official status above their fellow candidates in the General Election. Some will return victorious for another five years (or until another advantageously early election). Some have decided that it’s time to go. Others will find that their local electorates have decided it is time for them to go.  Elections are exciting for the political world. They activate a gene in politicians that the rest of us fortunately do not possess, which makes them enjoy six weeks of trying to