Rishi sunak

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Why was Jeremy Hunt SHOUTING AT ME?

Robert Jenrick, once immigration minister and still, just, MP for Newark, said on Sunday that the Tories lost not because ‘they had this slogan or that slogan… but because they failed to deliver’. Yes, absolutely, they failed to deliver, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that the slogans were diabolical too. In fact it was because of how awful the Tory slogans were, and the tenor of their whole social media campaign, that I couldn’t in the end bring myself to vote Conservative, though I have no other natural political home. Messages from Conservative HQ, sent as if from different senior Tories, all had the same crazed voice When

Charles Moore Charles Moore

What the Tories got wrong on housing

Sir Keir Starmer may be our first atheist prime minister, but his manner in parliament resembles that of what, in House of Lords terminology, is called a ‘Most Reverend prelate’. There is a lot of sonority about serving others, disagreeing well etc. These are good sentiments but, when trying to be good, ‘show, not tell’ is better. Adopting an archiepiscopal tone, a political leader is quickly tripped up. For example, Sir Keir wants to drive peers aged over 80 out of the Lords, thinking this conducive to the public good; and yet, as I write, he is having his first much-prized bilateral with Joe Biden, who is six years older

Thursday

Katy Balls

Exit poll predicts Labour landslide

12 min listen

The polls have closed and the exit poll is in. The BBC exit poll projects that Labour will win a landslide of 410 MPs and the Conservatives will be left with 131 seats. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats will win 61 seats, the SNP ten seats and Reform 13 seats. This would mean a Labour majority of 170 – and would be the Tories’ worst ever result. Megan McElroy speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews. 

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

History will judge Rishi Sunak kindly

Memorably sweeping statements tripping easily from the tongue have a habit of worming their way into assumptions we make and ending up as the judgment of history. The word ‘appeasement’ rather than the decisions Neville Chamberlain actually took have consigned the name of a defensible statesman to something approaching a term of abuse. ‘Milk snatcher’ did Margaret Thatcher immense damage. The ‘winter of discontent’ has become too easy a shorthand for the coinciding of deep-seated problems which Thatcher herself approached with great caution. I believe Sunak did a sterling job getting grown-up government back on its feet after Johnson and Truss ‘Dementia tax’ was an expression critically important in the

Thursday

Katy Balls

What’s the worst that can happen for the Tories?

When Rishi Sunak stunned his cabinet colleagues by calling a snap election, they feared the worst. Fast forward a month and what they originally saw as the worst-case scenario now looks like quite a good result. At the time, losing the election but retaining 200 MPs seemed plausible. While the polls vary, the consistent theme now is that the Conservatives are on course for their worst defeat in history – and could end up with as few as 50 MPs. The campaign has been dominated by gaffes, from Sunak’s rain-drenched election announcement to the D-Day debacle. And this week, most damaging of all, the gambling scandal. Five Tory figures (two

Tuesday

Katy Balls

Who will survive?

14 min listen

It’s another bad day for the Conservatives. Rishi Sunak has withdrawn support for the Tory candidates involved in the general election betting scandal. What has led to the timing of this decision? Also on the podcast, James Kanagasooriam, Chief Research Officer of Focaldata, explains their latest poll that suggests a 250-seat Labour majority. He joins Katy Balls and James Heale. 

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Would you want Nigel Farage to marry your daughter?

The opposite of attraction is repulsion. Political commentary gives too little attention to a party’s (or leader’s) capacity to repel. Attractiveness to some may itself inspire disgust in others, simultaneously lifting support yet imposing a ceiling upon how high. Here’s a quiz. Our last five elections have seen Labour and the Conservatives slugging it out for primacy, each election leaving one of them the loser. It is upon the losers that I wish to focus. Here, from those five results, are the raw (rounded) totals of votes cast, nationwide, for the loser in each case. I want you to guess which party leader lost which election, so I’ve ranked the

Tuesday

Katy Balls

Is Sunak’s cautious manifesto a mistake?

13 min listen

Conservatives hoping to turn their fortunes around with the publication of the party’s manifesto have been disappointed. The document contained little by way of surprises or rabbits, and despite Sunak’s pledge that the Conservatives are the party of tax cutting, the new costings show that the tax burden will continue to rise. Katy Balls talks to James Heale and Kate Andrews. Join the Coffee House Shots team for a live recording on Thursday 11 July. Get tickets at spectator.co.uk/live. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Reform wants the Tories destroyed

There was a very excitable young man on Sky News last week, talking about the Sky/YouGov MRP poll which suggested that the vast majority of Conservative MPs would lose their seats on 4 July and that those who didn’t would be stung to death by invasive killer Asian hornets which, reputedly, can eat up to 50 Tories in a single day. This would leave the Labour party and the unimaginably ghastly Ed Davey with the sort of majority reminiscent of those regularly recorded in the USSR or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. They are looking for their pound of flesh from a party they believe has gone awry and reneged on principle

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: Farage returns, Abbott reselected and Trump guilty 

Home Nigel Farage took over leadership of the Reform party from Richard Tice and is standing for parliament in Clacton. This came as news on Monday to Tice, and to Reform’s candidate for Clacton, Tony Mack. Outside the Wetherspoons pub where he launched his campaign, Farage had a McDonald’s banana milkshake thrown over him. Farage proposed net-zero immigration. The Conservatives then said they would ask the independent Migration Advisory Committee for a recommended level for an annual cap on visas, and put that to a parliamentary vote. Invasive Asian hornets, which can eat 50 bees a day, were found to have survived a British winter and might stay permanently. Rishi

Tuesday

James Heale

What would it take for Sunak to have a breakthrough?

13 min listen

Some Conservatives have put their hopes on tonight’s TV debate as a breakthrough moment for the lacklustre and disorganised Tory campaign, but will it really be a gamechanger? James Heale talks to Isabel Hardman about why she’s sceptical, and to the pollster Chris Hopkins at Savanta about why the Tories just aren’t closing that poll gap. Produced by Megan McElroy and Cindy Yu.

Ross Clark Ross Clark

The problem with Sunak’s migrant cap

It is perhaps no accident that Rishi Sunak has rushed out his proposal for a cap on migrant workers and their dependants the day after Nigel Farage announced that he was taking over as leader of Reform UK. But you wonder how many votes there really are in a migration cap when Farage is already out there promising to reduce net migration to zero – a new interpretation of net zero, if you like. If you don’t like migration at all, Reform UK would seem to be your obvious choice. If, on the other hand, you are offended by illegal migration while accepting the argument that employers need the right

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The right must unite

I mentioned here recently that to my mind Boris Johnson bears a fairish similarity to Dr Faustus, as Christopher Marlowe portrayed him: selling his soul only to then waste his time in futile and silly gestures. The Conservative party is one of the only political parties whose leader seems to rather dislike its own voters Perhaps I can now add Rishi Sunak as another possible stand-in for that role. As Sunak announced a general election in the drenching rain last week, I was forced to ask again: ‘What was the point of all this? What was the point of rising up the ladder, of knifing his predecessor, of working, campaigning

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

What’s behind the Tory exodus?

11 min listen

It’s day four of the election campaign, and Michael Gove has joined the growing Tory exodus and announced he’s standing down at the election. What’s behind his decision, and how will it affect Rishi Sunak? Megan McElroy speaks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls.  Produced by Megan McElroy.

Thursday

Katy Balls

The deluge: Rishi Sunak’s election gamble

‘Only a Conservative government, led by me, will not put our hard-earned economic stability at risk,’ said Rishi Sunak as he announced a general election on the steps of Downing Street in the pouring rain. Upon these words, the Labour anthem ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ boomed out from the street. The din made the rest of his speech nearly inaudible. His suit jacket went from wet to soaking. ‘It’s bizarre,’ said one former minister. ‘How are we supposed to trust No. 10’s judgment when no one in the group even knows what an umbrella is?’  Sunak’s gamble is that while he can’t get a hearing in government, he might

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Sex and the shires: Plum Sykes reveals all

‘I looked at a picture of him today and thought: “Why are you wearing those expensive clothes, you twit?”’ Plum Sykes is in the Claridge’s ArtSpace Café, eating the avocado on toast and talking about Rishi Sunak. ‘He looks like he’s wearing handmade shoes, which is a real no-no – a real no-no! But he can’t stop himself.’ ‘People want to be Martha Stewart, Carole Bamford. I’m not sure they want to be Meghan Markle’ David Cameron would never be so gauche, says Plum. ‘In fact, I remember asking David about that and he said he’d never wear a custom-made suit on the campaign trail because it sends the wrong

The Spectator

Letters: the Tory party has gone mad

Right is wrong Sir: Katy Balls’s article ‘Survival Plan’ (4 May) starts from a false premise. The problem is not Rishi Sunak, but the current Conservative party’s underlying ethos. With Brexit, the lunatics took over the asylum. The ‘Get Brexit Done’ single-issue election resulted in a Conservative party, cabinet and parliamentary majority sharing populist right-wing views and convinced that the country supported them in all their beliefs. Although Brexit has clearly failed and Boris Johnson has been disposed of, many of the underlying convictions associated with the Brexit philosophy remain. The obvious demonstration of this was the disastrous election of Liz Truss as leader despite the common sense warnings of

Toby Young Toby Young

Do voters really prefer Starmer?

Rishi Sunak has been widely ridiculed for trying to spin the local election results as bad news for Keir Starmer. While acknowledging they were ‘bitterly disappointing’ for the Tories, the Prime Minister cited an analysis by Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, the renowned psephologists, showing that a similar showing by Labour in a general election would leave the party 32 seats short of an overall majority. ‘Keir Starmer propped up in Downing Street by the SNP, Liberal Democrats and the Greens would be a disaster for Britain,’ he said. This was wishful thinking, according to John Curtice, the polling expert. He pointed out that the way people vote in local elections

Wednesday

James Heale

Sunak’s Truss problem

11 min listen

The day after her book was published, Rishi Sunak faced down questions from Keir Starmer and Labour members at PMQs about Liz Truss. While he had his replies at the ready, the questions underscored the main issue for Sunak: how should he deal with his predecessor?  Also on the podcast, there is more inflation news for the Government, and how will Starmer deal with internal party discipline? James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Isabel Hardman. Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

Thursday

Katy Balls

Is Cameron upstaging Sunak?

The logic behind Rishi Sunak’s decision to make David Cameron foreign secretary was that he would be a ‘big beast’ on the world stage and wouldn’t need much instruction. Six months on, that plan is going reasonably well, insofar as Cameron appears to be setting his own agenda. It also means he’s making his own mistakes. In February, his foray into US politics misfired when, in an article for the website the Hill, he appeared to lecture Americans about support for Ukraine, telling them not to show the ‘weakness displayed against Hitler’. A key Donald Trump ally, Marjorie Taylor Greene, responded that ‘David Cameron can kiss my ass’. This week,