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The speeches in the Commons which follow the Queen’s Speech blend together humour with some serious points. They are the Commons as its most clubbable, with lots of in jokes and the like. So, there was a fair amount of chatter about how Jeremy Corbyn – who is not the clubbable sort – would deal with the occasion. At first, the answer was surprisingly well. He was funny, and generous, about the proposer, Caroline Spelman, and the second, Philip Lee. The House was laughing with him, and even Cameron couldn’t help but chuckle at some rather good jokes including those at his own party’s expense. But then Corbyn turned serious,

When the SNP 56 were elected to Parliament, they were heralded as a breath of fresh air in an otherwise archaic institution. The nationalists made clear that they were unhappy to be moved to Westminster, let alone indulge in its pleasures. Despite this, they appear to have grown accustomed to their surroundings over time, with reports surfacing of their taste for Parliament’s many taxpayer-subsidised bars. Now it appears that other Westminster indulgences are also proving too hard to resist. The Daily Mail reports that Angus MacNeil and Stewart Hosie have both separated from their wives after enjoying the company of the same woman. The paper reports that both men enjoyed relationships — at different times — with Serena Cowdy, a

By now, Labour should be rather good at post-defeat inquests. Plenty have been conducted over the years and the drill has become familiar. The party goes into an election promising a certain vision of the future only to find out that it leaves the voters cold. A senior figure is then commissioned to state the obvious, and the report is sent back to the leader’s office, where it is filed and ignored. Then the party embarks upon a fresh misadventure — and the cycle of defeat begins again. This week Labour is digesting its worst result in Scotland since 1918, having lost not only to the nationalists but to the

As the dust settles on Thursday’s election, it becomes ever clearer that—with the exception of London—these were awful results for Labour. They were bad enough to suggest that the party is on course for a third successive general election defeat. But, as I say in The Sun, not disastrous enough to persuade the Labour membership that they need to dump Corbyn. One Tory Minister remarked to me yesterday, ‘Labour have done well enough to keep Corbyn. I can live with that.’ Before adding, ‘Corbyn’s survival is the single most important thing for 2020’. The result that should worry Labour most, though, is the Scottish one. As the third party of

The election results that we’ve had through so far are a pretty potent combination for the Labour party. Diane Abbott said this morning that they show that Labour is on course to win the 2020 general election, while Jeremy Corbyn skirted around what they actually meant for the party in the long-term when he gave his reaction. The potency lies in the party’s devastation in Scotland that points to a long-term structural inability to win a majority coupled with English council results that, by being less bad than expected, deceive about the challenge the party faces in winning in those areas in 2020. The party’s moderates are concerned this morning

Britain goes to the polls this week, as electoral contests take place in London, Scotland, Wales and across England. They’re the elections which James Forsyth described in the Spectator last week as the ones ‘no one has even heard of’. So what will happen on Thursday night and when will the results be announced? Here’s The Spectator’s run-through of the May 2016 elections: London Mayoral election: Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan go head-to-head in the London Mayoral contest. In 2012, Boris and Ken ran a close-fought race, with Boris getting 971,000 first-round votes to Ken’s 889,918. The relatively small margin between the two meant the result didn’t filter through until

Strange as it may seem, there are still people around David Cameron who regard the Scottish referendum campaign as a great success. Yes, they say, the nationalists didn’t like the original ‘Project Fear’ — the attempt to frighten Scotland into voting no — but it worked. Alex Salmond was defeated by a 10 per cent margin — proof, it’s argued, that relentless negativity works. Those who complain about it are either losers, or too squeamish to win. Andrew Cooper, chief of the Scottish ‘in’ campaign, said afterwards that the only criticism he would accept is that it was not negative enough. This attitude is a poison in the bloodstream of

Although Nicola Sturgeon puts her career in politics down to Margaret Thatcher, she scarcely has anything positive to say about the Iron Lady. In fact, the SNP leader says that she entered politics as a result of her anger at the impact of Thatcher’s politics on Scotland. Still, she appears to have no qualms about borrowing one of the methods Thatcher used to help ensure success at the polls. The SNP’s latest election advert bears the slogan ‘don’t just hope for a better Scotland, vote for one’. As Scottish Labour have since pointed out, this bears a strong resemblance to Thatcher’s 1979 election slogan, which read: ‘Don’t just hope for a better life. Vote for

Do you want to know what it looks like when one party has become the most dominant force in its country’s political history, when one in every 30-odd voters is a member of that party and when it is regularly topping 50 per cent in the polls? Then look no further than central Edinburgh this morning where Nicola Sturgeon was launching the SNP’s Holyrood election manifesto. The queues to get in to the Edinburgh International Conference Centre stretched back for several streets as supporters and party members waited eagerly in the warm spring sunshine for the chance to hear, and see, their leader in person. The inside of the hall

Just a few days into the official campaign for the Holyrood elections and Ruth Davidson has had to change her tactics. The plan had originally been for the Scottish Conservatives to run a serious campaign which has fewer tanks than the election campaign, and more serious speeches. ‘We tried that whole idea of you know we’re going to do this really stripped down, just speeches, and just like listening to people bla bla bla,’ says Davidson. ‘And then kind of all the press went this is really boring and we went, yeah, it kind of is.’ And so Davidson has been playing ice hockey, racing blue and red cars, and

Politics, as we know, makes the strangest of bedfellows. Step forward Tam Dalyell, Laird of The Binns and erstwhile Father of the House, and the editor of this estimable organ. In the space of this last week I have heard/read both sources refer to Scotland having a one-party state in the shape of the Scottish National Party; the former at Glasgow’s Aye Write! Book Festival and the latter in an editorial on Donald Trump. I would have expected better from both! At the last count there were certainly a handful of countries to whom that description could properly be applied. North Korea and the People’s Republic of China spring to

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/spectatorpolitics/georgeosbornesbudget-2016/media.mp3″ title=”Fraser Nelson, Isabel Hardman and James Forsyth discuss today’s Budget”] Listen [/audioplayer]Alex Salmond had planned 24 March 2016 as his independence day and the budget he published during the Scottish independence referendum envisaged it having up to £7.5 billion of oil to spend. Today’s Budget shows that the figure will, instead be zero: precisely 100 per cent less than what the SNP had told Scots. Without it, the Scottish budget simply would not stand up. The basic point – ‘it’s Scotland’s oil!’ – has been the SNP refrain for years. There’s still oil in the North Sea but there’s no profit. The above graph shows how North Sea revenues – seen by the