Labour party

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

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

What a very boring election this is. The Tories are trying to keep their Prime Minister away from anyone who isn’t an android programmed to wave a placard about ‘strong and stable leadership’. Journalists from local papers are being kept in rooms to prevent them from – gasp – filming an interview with the Prime Minister for their websites. Other events take place away from the media entirely, with Theresa May cocooned safely among Tory activists: the political equivalent of a tree falling in an empty forest. Over the bank holiday, the Sunday papers carried tales of a row between May and her key aide Fiona Hill in which the Prime

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,

Theresa May – Conservatives will not raise VAT Touring both the BBC and ITV studios today, Theresa May tried her best to avoid giving specific answers about the Conservatives tax policies after the election. However, during an interview with Robert Peston, the Prime Minister appeared to disown David Cameron’s ‘triple lock’ and make a commitment that a Conservative government would not raise the level of VAT above 20% over the next Parliament: Peston: Given what you say your record as a party is on taxes, do you need to repeat David Cameron’s triple lock – no rise in VAT, no rise in National Insurance, no rise in income tax –

When launching the Scottish National Party’s election campaign, Nicola Sturgeon said the word ‘Tory’ 20 times in 20 minutes. For much of her political lifetime, it has been used by the SNP as the dirtiest word in Scottish politics. Nationalists have long liked to portray the Conservatives as the successors to Edward Longshanks: an occupying army with little affinity for the people they were trying to govern. But things are changing fast in Scotland. Amid the other political dramas of the past few months, the revival of Tory support north of the border has gone relatively unnoticed. They had only one MP after the last election, but a poll this