Jeremy corbyn

Monday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Please can the bullying of Theresa May stop?

We all remember it from school, whether as perpetrator, or assistant of perpetrator, or victim: the moment when everyone turns against another pupil and it becomes legitimate to be vile to her. When she is ‘down’, it becomes more and more enjoyable to torture her and to find endless new aspects of her to be woundingly vicious about, every hour of every day. It has been like this for Theresa May in the last week. She’s the outcast in the playground, knowing that if she so much as opens her mouth to say something, she’ll receive a torrent of withering sarcasm. Please can it stop? It leaves a nasty taste

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: Hammond undermines May over Brexit ‘no deal’

Philip Hammond – No deal would be ‘a very, very bad outcome’ One day before Brexit negotiations get underway, Philip Hammond took to the Andrew Marr Show and announced that if the UK achieved no deal with the EU it would be a ‘very very bad outcome’. This appears to be somewhat at odds with Theresa May’s repeated assertion that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’… Marr: Do you think no deal is better than a bad deal? Hammond: Let me be clear that no deal would be a very, very bad outcome for Britain. But there is a possible worse outcome, and that is a deal that

Saturday

Ross Clark

Theresa May’s problem is that she is far too British for her own good

While I was rummaging through data on what Treasury officials had spent on their credit cards, back in George Osborne’s day, I came across a series of curious payments. The Treasury had been paying RADA for coaching sessions. Ministers – I presume it was them rather than civil servants – were being trained by actors. Maybe they should have done the same at the Home Office, because the failure of the then Home Secretary to perform in public could very rapidly turn out to be her undoing.   Her failure to express empathy during the election campaign was already being dragged up in election post-mortems.  But what has happened since the

Friday

Ross Clark

Trying to turn Grenfell Tower into a morality tale about the rich and poor stinks

Who would want to be a political leader in the wake of a disaster such as that of Grenfell Tower? If you show up and hug the victims you run the risk of being accused of opportunism and obstructing the emergency services in their work; if you stay away from the site you will be accused of callousness – even if you are spending your time working on the practical issues relating to the event. But there is a very strong emerging narrative: that Jeremy Corbyn got it right by turning up and sharing the grief of the victims, and that Theresa May got it horribly wrong by restricting her

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Those who died at Grenfell Tower were the victims of bad government

Had the Grenfell Tower tragedy befallen one of the millionaire high-rises built along the Thames recently, it would still be a catastrophe that shocked the country and the world. But what makes this disaster so numbing and sickening is to see, in the faces of the dead, some of the most vulnerable people in our society. People who were, in effect, in the care of the state – that is to say, in our collective care. If we pay taxes and vote, we’re part of a system that’s supposed to devote the greatest attention to those in greatest need of government help. And on Tuesday night, dozens of them were

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 15 June 2017

Divining Rod Sir: Please congratulate Rod Liddle on being the only commentator who accurately forecast the uncertain general election result (‘This is the worst Tory campaign ever’, 27 May). His prediction of the ‘stickiness’ of the Labour vote and the likelihood that Ukippers would return to the Conservatives in the south, where they mostly were not needed, were especially prescient. Mr Liddle goes to show that instinct, common sense and a sceptical nous are worth more than all the pseudoscience of polling. Well done him. Poor old us! Dr Barry Moyse North Petherton, Somerset Our lefty deplorables Sir: An astonishing 41 per cent of the British electorate voted for Jeremy

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 15 June 2017

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, spent the week confronting the consequences of the general election that she had called to bring ‘stability and certainty for the future’. It had instead surprisingly left the Conservatives with no overall majority. They won 318 seats (a loss of 13) and Labour 262 (a gain of 30). The Scottish National Party won 35 (a loss of 21), with the Conservatives gaining 12 extra seats in Scotland, even capturing Stirling. Labour won an extra five seats in Scotland. Angus Robertson, the SNP leader at Westminster, lost his seat, as did Alex Salmond. Nick Clegg, the former Lib-Dem leader, lost his seat, but Sir Vince Cable won

Nick Hilton Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Rebooting the Maybot

On this week’s episode, we examine the fallout from last week’s shock election result, and ask what’s next for both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. And, to give you a brief respite from all the politics, we also speak to one of the world’s greatest living pianists. First up: In this week’s magazine, James Forsyth describes the repercussions of the hung parliament within the Conservative party, and the attempt being made to ‘reboot the Maybot’. But can the Prime Minister be patched back to health? Or is she so defective that she’s set to be junked? James joins the podcast, along with Andrew Rawnsley, Chief Political Commentator of The Observer. As

Will Heaven

Why didn’t Theresa May meet Grenfell Tower survivors?

We can’t yet be sure what caused the devastating fire at Grenfell Tower. Early speculation, some of it expert, some of it not but based on eyewitness testimony, points to the cladding on the outside of the building, which was added during a recent £8.6m makeover. This, it seems, may have turned an ugly but safe concrete tower into a death trap. Nor do we have any idea how many people were killed in the blaze. Commander Stuart Cundy of the Metropolitan Police said at 11 a.m. today: ‘Sadly I can confirm the number of people that have died is now 17. We do believe that that number will increase.’ There

Ross Clark Ross Clark

Are conservatives a bunch of neanderthals? Some on the left seem to think so

How tragic that the country – and indeed the world – is being dragged rightwards by a bunch of Neanderthal conservatives who relish ignorance and despise experts. That, in as many words, was the argument advanced here by Nick Cohen on Monday, as well as by many others on the Left. Nick wrote: ‘…in Britain and America one trend is clear: the better-educated you are the less likely you are to vote for the right. Like Mill, I am not arguing that educated people are always clever. Intellectuals have always included fanatics and cranks among their number. But I can say this: in a country where ever more people are going

Ed West Ed West

The future belongs to the Left

When I was in my early 20s and quite conservative I assumed I was just an anomaly, someone who develops these traits earlier than normal, and conservatism was like baldness or impotence or the other bad things that get you in middle age; most of my friends and contemporaries would catch up at some point, because these things just develop at different speeds. Now in my late 30s I realise it’s worse than that and almost none of my friends and acquaintances are going to become more conservative; if anything, they’ve become more left-wing than they were 20 years ago, as the barometer of what is progressive and therefore acceptable

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Labour’s happy surprise

‘Science,’ wrote Jules Verne, ‘is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.’ Perhaps this is why politics, which claims to be a science, is so littered with tremendous errors at the moment. It wasn’t just the pollsters and the pundits in Westminster who called this election wrong. People embedded in constituencies couldn’t even correctly predict their own results. These days, politics seems a lot more like alchemy than a real science. On the night before polling day, a group of Labour MPs compared notes about how things were looking in their patches. It was

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Corbyn copy

Since the election, Jeremy Corbyn has been parading himself as prime-minister-in-waiting. ‘Cancellation of President Trump’s State Visit is welcome,’ he tweeted this week, ‘especially after his attack on London’s Mayor and withdrawal from #ParisClimateDeal.’ The message was clear: unlike ‘Theresa the appeaser’, Jeremy is willing and able to tell that climate change-denying Islamophobe across the water to get stuffed. Jez we can, Jez we can. There may be another reason why Corbyn is glad to think that Trump might not come to these shores, and that’s because the more the British see of the dreaded Donald, the more they might recognise how much he and the Labour leader have in

James Delingpole James Delingpole

I don’t blame millennials for voting for Corbyn

On the morning after the election I was drinking coffee with one of my heroes, Sir Roger Scruton. We talked about the moment during the 1968 Paris évenéments when Scruton, who had been fairly apolitical up to that point, suddenly discovered he was a conservative. He had watched the educated children of privilege wantonly destroying the property of their social inferiors in the name of something or other, and realised: ‘Whatever they are for, I am against.’ That was the reason he has spent so much of his life since trying to develop a philosophy of conservatism as thorough, persuasive and enticing as the variations on Marxism so compelling to

Hugo Rifkind Hugo Rifkind

The Conservatives’ real problem? It’s that the electorate now sees them as reckless

The opposition wants to raze your house to the ground. No, bear with me. Analogy. They say they’ll pull it down, and build a new one with, I don’t know, walls of gold, and hot and cold running unicorns. ‘You can’t trust them,’ says the government, ‘because they want to knock your house down!’ And normally, normally, this would be quite an effective message. Only this time it is delivered from inside the cab of a JCB by a government that also wants to knock down your house, and has already demolished your garden wall. ‘Honk honk!’ they’re going, on that pull-down-horn thing, with eyes gleaming like those of actual

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Where are the Tory hordes shrieking ‘lefty scum’?

The Conservative party lost the general election, even if they are still in power (at time of writing). It was a defeat — as awful and fundamental a defeat for the political right as any I can remember. Brexit is now endangered. And few would doubt that a subsequent election would mean a victory for a very left-wing and jubilant Labour party. It is, then, a catastrophe for the right. And here’s what hasn’t happened as a consequence: 1. There are no hordes of right-wing demonstrators on Westminster Green screaming ‘Labour scum’ and spitting at anyone they think might be a socialist. Nobody has, to my knowledge, set fire to

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

The Tories must learn fast to avoid the chilling prospect of Prime Minister Corbyn

Nick Timothy has penned an honest and reflective piece about the Tory election boorach. It can’t have been easy to write less than a week on from defeat and his departure from Downing Street. The most important point he makes is substantive. Theresa May abandoned the One Nation vision she sketched out on the doorstep of Number 10 upon becoming Prime Minister. It was a blueprint for a modern conservatism that believed in markets but didn’t worship them, that championed liberty but also the freedom to take advantage of its opportunities. It was a communitarian Toryism halfway between Burke and Berlin — the kind of politics advocated by Robert Halfon, sacked

Tuesday

Katy Balls

Corbyn-mania hits the Parliamentary Labour Party

It tends to be the case that if you hear cheers from outside a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, it’s safe to bet it’s not Jeremy Corbyn doing the talking. However, tonight that all changed. The Labour leader received a 45-second standing ovation from his colleagues in what was a positive and productive meeting. After Labour defied expectations in last week’s election, the leader was welcomed by his party with rapturous applause. In his speech to his party, Corbyn said they had shown what they can do when the party is united – and that this must continue as they campaign to win power: ‘Last Thursday, we turned the tables on

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

What is Labour’s policy on Brexit? We’re still no closer to knowing

What is Labour’s policy on Brexit? No one has ever really known the answer to this question, and it doesn’t seem to be any closer to being resolved now that the election is out of the way, either. Sir Keir Starmer yesterday attacked the government for ‘simply sweeping options off the table before they even started with the negotiations’, including saying Britain will not seek to be a member of the Single Market. But Jeremy Corbyn has said in the past few days that Brexit ‘absolutely’ means leaving the single market – a stance echoed by John McDonnell. The party is now trying to work out how to unite after

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Jeremy Corbyn is now bookies’ favourite to be next UK Prime Minister

Well, this is going well. As the Tories pretend that all will be well under a reprogrammed Maybot, the expectations outside SW1 are rather different. Let’s say someone moves against her, the other candidates start to move too – and before you can say Boris the party has formed another circular firing squad. What happens? What if the Tories can’t keep it together and there’s another general election? The bookies have decided: Jeremy Corbyn is more likely than anyone else to succeed Theresa May. Now the bookies get things wrong almost as regularly as pollsters, but expectation matters a lot in politics – and business. If most Tories think Corbyn is close