Jeremy corbyn

On this week’s episode, we look at the rebirth of the Scottish Conservatives, ask whether it’s helpful to call Marine Le Pen a fascist, and consider what the future holds for Britain’s opposition parties. First, in this week’s magazine, Alex Massie profiles Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, who has overseen an extraordinary regeneration for her party in the last two years. Are the Tories the Unionist force du jour in Scotland? And can they make significant gains off the SNP, in a country that has had a frosty relationship with their English siblings? Ruth joins the podcast to discuss their campaign, along with Fraser Nelson. As Alex Massie writes in his cover piece: “…the

When my old friend – a lifelong Labour supporter – told me he was voting Tory at the election, I posted a message on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RevRichardColes/status/858296208477040640 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

I awoke this 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 particular kind of fungi or leaf mould. This would leave Diane on an intellectual par with Emily ­Thornberry,

Almost two weeks in, and before the short campaign has even started, people are starting to wise up to Theresa May’s conjuring trick. Last week, Philip Collins of the Times tweeted ‘I am usually a strong defender of politics but this empty, choreographed, stale, boring Tory campaign essentially implies we are all idiots’ (which was retweeted four and a half thousand times). This was then followed up by a performance on Marr that Fraser Nelson judged to have ‘perfected the art of saying nothing’. At the same time, people are still picking holes in the Labour effort. On Thursday, a video emerged of Jeremy Corbyn heading to address a crowd,

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