General election 2017

Thursday

Toby Young

Stupid is as stupid votes

John Stuart Mill is usually credited as the person who first called the Conservatives ‘the stupid party’, but that isn’t quite accurate. Rather, he referred to the Tories as the stupidest party, and he didn’t mean that it was more stupid than every other party in the country, just the Liberals. If you substitute the Lib Dems for the Liberal party, that probably isn’t true any more, and it certainly isn’t true if you include Labour in the mix. No, I think there is now a strong case for passing the crown to Jeremy Corbyn’s party. If you look at Labour’s leaders, this is a very recent development. Harold Wilson

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The economy isn’t all roses, but that’s no reason not to vote for Mrs May

As the election campaign goes into full swing, we hear surprisingly little about the state of the UK economy — because the Tories can’t (and probably don’t need to) promise that they can make it any better in the medium term than it is now, while almost no one takes seriously what Labour has to say about it. The truth is, against the odds and for the time being, that it’s ticking along nicely enough not to be a top concern for most voters. Are we right to be so complacent? After a slowdown in growth to just 0.3 per cent in January to March, most analysts expect a pick-up

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Twelve months of May

Normally, the first anniversary of a prime minister taking office is the occasion for a lot of opinion polls and assessments. But by going to the country early, Theresa May has pre-empted that. By the time she has been in No. 10 a year, the voters will already have delivered their verdict via the ballot box. Still, it is worth assessing what May has done so far. When she arrived in No. 10, her team had three main priorities. They wanted to complete the modernisation process by making the Tories more appealing to the so-called ‘just about managing’ classes, and to those outside the party’s heartlands. They were determined to shore

The Spectator

Barometer | 11 May 2017

God forbid Irish police investigated Stephen Fry over a complaint of blasphemy, which is no longer a criminal offence in Britain. — The last prosecution was a private case brought by Mary Whitehouse against Gay News and its editor Denis Lemon over a poem in which a Roman centurion tells of having sex with Jesus after his crucifixion. Gay News was fined £1,000 and Lemon £500; he also received a suspended jail sentence. — The last man in Britain jailed for blasphemy was Bradford trouser salesman John William Gott, who got nine months’ hard labour in 1921 for calling Jesus a circus clown. He died soon after his release. Left-leaning

Toby Young Toby Young

Magical thinking isn’t a political position

I’m due to debate the philosopher A.C. Grayling on Saturday about whether there should be a second EU referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal. It is part of a two-day event being held at Central Hall, Westminster, on ‘Brexit and the political crash’. It is billed as a ‘convention’, an opportunity for all sides in this debate to discuss Britain’s future, but the reference to the ‘political crash’ is a giveaway. Brexit isn’t a revolt against out-of-touch elites or even a new departure that may or may not be good for the country. No, it is a ‘crash’, as in ‘car crash’ or ‘economic crash’. In reality, the

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Diane’s grey matter and Labour’s sticky votes

I awoke the other morning to hear Diane Abbott’s brains leaking out of her ears and all over the carpet during an interview with LBC’s excellent Nick Ferrari. You will need a mop and a bucket very sharpish, I thought to myself, as she gabbled on, the hole beneath her feet growing larger with every syllable she uttered. Diane has had the brain leakage problem before, many times, and my worry is that following the LBC debacle there is almost nothing left inside her skull at all, just a thin greyish residue resembling a kind of fungi or leaf mould. This would leave her on an intellectual par with Emily

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

Labour’s election strategy – vote for us and watch us lose

The crapness of Corbyn’s Labour is a phenomenon. It fascinates me. Frankly, it does my head in. For there is a theory, you see, that Corbyn’s Labour isn’t really crap at all. That it is all a conspiracy. That journalists such as me, who I suspect are ‘neoliberal’ or something, merely construct a narrative demonising it as such. Where politicians match our prejudices, this theory goes, we give them enormous leeway and spring to their defence. When they don’t, we supposedly deem them ‘mad’ or ‘radical’ or, yes, ‘crap’, in a spirit of sheer defensiveness. It’s a neat theory, this, and very occasionally I even find myself wondering if it

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Never mind the election – Corbynism isn’t going away

General elections are meant to produce a government and an opposition — ideally, a decent version of both. It is obvious what government this election will deliver: a Tory one with an increased majority. That, after all, is one of the reasons why Theresa May has decided to go to the country three years early. But it is not clear what opposition there will be. What passes for optimism in moderate Labour circles these days is the belief that a shellacking in this election will lead to Jeremy Corbyn’s departure, as the party’s membership sobers up and elects a new and sensible leader. But it is far from certain that

The Spectator

Letters | 4 May 2017

Liverpudlian censorship Sir: I enjoyed Kelvin MacKenzie’s Diary (29 April). The obloquy thrown at him after his criticism of Everton footballer Ross Barkley would be laughable if it were not for the unpleasant undercurrent on Merseyside now. His remark was football banter, not a racist slur as the mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson, has alleged. What the mayor (or ‘Fat Joe’, as he is known) has failed to do is speak up for free speech. It is — and I deeply regret to say this about my home town — a scandal that newsagents in Liverpool are threatened by violent thugs if they stock the Sun. There was a ‘Ban

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 4 May 2017

Home Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, told Theresa May after dinner with her on 26 April, ‘I’m leaving Downing Street ten times more sceptical than I was before,’ according to an account in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. At the dinner, also attended by Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, and David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, Mrs May was said to have declared that Britain was not legally obliged to pay the EU ‘a penny’; Mr Juncker said ‘the EU is not a golf club’ with a subscription that could be cancelled at any time. ‘Let us make Brexit a success,’ May is said to have remarked, to which

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

Why Theresa May’s 1970s-style energy price caps won’t work

Better access to education. Tax cuts for anyone in the struggling middle. More affordable homes, and more money for the National Heath Service. There is nothing wrong with Theresa May seeking to stake out the centre ground of British politics and stop Brexit turning into a right-wing campaign to turn back the clock. But one might have imagined she’d use conservative means to achieve this, rather than raiding Ed Miliband’s last manifesto for ideas. The proposed price cap on energy companies is an alarming example of Mrs May’s left turn. There are so many ways in which the price cap is a genuinely terrible idea that it is hard to

Toby Young Toby Young

A progressive alliance? It’s more a coalition of chaos

My heart soared when I first heard the phrase ‘progressive alliance’ in this election campaign. Not the reaction you’d expect, perhaps, but any attempt to persuade people to vote tactically on the eve of a general election is doomed to failure. A complete waste of time. I should know because I tried to get a similar venture off the ground three years ago. Mine was a conservative version, obviously. In 2014 I was worried that the split on the right would enable Ed Miliband to become our next prime minister. So I launched a Unite the Right campaign and set about trying to persuade supporters of Ukip and the Tories

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 27 April 2017

Home Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, cheered the United Kingdom by promising four new bank holidays for the whole country when he becomes prime minister, for the patronal days of St David, St Patrick, St George and St Andrew. Asked about the replacement for the Trident nuclear deterrent, he said: ‘I’ve made clear any use of nuclear weapons would be a disaster for the whole world.’ Three hours later, the Labour party put out a statement saying: ‘The decision to renew Trident has been taken and Labour supports that.’ The Communist Party decided not to field candidates against Labour. Theresa May, the Prime Minister, visited South Wales, following a YouGov

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Why Tories are talking up Labour

Considering that their party is expected to win by a landslide, the Tory spin doctors sound unusually panicked. They are keen to point out that the polls aren’t always right, and the pollsters are still trying to correct what they got wrong at the last general election. They insist that national voting tells you little about what will happen in the key marginal seats. These are normally the pleas of a party that is failing, and trying to persuade voters that it is still in the race. But Labour isn’t doing a good job of spinning its own prospects — so the Tories are doing it for them. This is

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Do do God

This election was won two days before it was announced, on Easter Sunday. Theresa May put out an Easter message in which she suggested that British values had a Christian basis. It was her version of David Cameron’s message two years before, in which he said that Britain is a Christian country. She was rather more convincing. I don’t know whether Cameron is sincerely religious, but he didn’t seem it. He didn’t even seem to try very hard to seem it, as if fearing that his metropolitan support might weaken, and perhaps that George Osborne would make a snarky jibe about it at cabinet. But it still did him good

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

What can May say to the Tory Remainers?

I don’t see it. I do not see the anatomy of how it all pans out. Theresa May will be the next Prime Minister because, jeez, who else is going to be? What I cannot see, though, is what she says, and to whom, along the way. Most of all, I cannot see what she says to Remainers. ‘Who cares?’ you may be thinking, and ‘get over it’ and ‘you lost’ and so on. Yet these arguments, while powerful, only get us so far. The fact is, quite a lot of people who formerly voted Conservative also voted Remain. In Mrs May’s own constituency, indeed, she may have a majority

Henry Jeffreys

Anti-social media

On Tuesday morning I was thinking to myself how oddly pleasant social media seemed. Then Theresa May dropped her election bomb. Immediately the posts started appearing: ‘Tory scum’ and ‘Tories launch coup’, then came the memes and I thought: I can’t take another two months of this. I’d only just tentatively returned to Twitter and Facebook following Brexit and Trump; now I find myself wanting to suspend my accounts again. I think back nostalgically to general elections of yesteryear. I vaguely remember some fellow students being pleased about Blair winning in 1997 but most of us were more excited about seeing Teenage Fanclub at Leeds Metropolitan University. The polls of

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

What I expect from this pointless election

A general election is called and in a matter of hours a neutral and unbiased BBC presenter has likened our Prime Minister to Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Governments rise and governments fall, but some things stay just as they always were. It was Eddie Mair on Radio 4’s PM programme who made the comparison, while interviewing the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. In fairness to Mair, he had been alluding to Theresa May’s apparent wish to create ‘unity’ within Westminster, a truly stupid statement within an address which sometimes made no semantic sense and sounded, to my ears, petulant and arrogant. Then along came the opinion pollsters to tell us exactly what

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 20 April 2017

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, having repeatedly said that there would be no election until 2020, surprised the nation by suddenly standing at a lectern in Downing Street, while the wind ruffled her hair, and saying that she sought a general election on 8 June. ‘Britain is leaving the EU and there can be no turning back,’ she said. ‘The country is coming together but Westminster is not.’ She said later that she had taken the decision after a walking holiday in Wales, and had spoken to the Queen on Easter Monday. The Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, passed in 2011, required a two-thirds majority of all MPs (or a motion

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 20 April 2017

The fact that nothing leaked about Mrs May’s snap election tells you much of what you need to know about her. It shows how iron is her discipline and how close her inner circle (so close, in fact, that it is a triangle rather than a circle). It suggests that she takes neither her cabinet nor her party into her confidence. It shows that if she wins the general election, her control of her administration will be much tighter than that of Margaret Thatcher (which was surprisingly loose) and even than that of David Cameron (which was surprisingly tight). Finally, it shows that if she loses, or gets a result