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Watching the general election from my newsroom is an out-of-body experience. I’ve been involved in the last five general elections variously as photocopy boy, parliamentary candidate, shadow minister, campaign manager and chancellor. This time I’m reporting on the election as editor of the Evening Standard. I have a lot to learn; but I have a great team to help me. There is something remarkable, magical even, about the way every day tens of thousands of words are written on everything from the implications of the French election to Arsène Wenger, to this summer’s trendiest cocktails; then laid out on pages with striking pictures and adverts; printed on a million copies;

I’m a Brexiteer and I’m glad Le Pen lost. Those Brexit-bashers who say ‘Brexit-Trump-Le-Pen’ almost as one word, as if they are the same thing, all weird, all evil, all a species of fascism, have got it utterly wrong. Brexit was democratic, optimistic, generous, a positive people’s strike for better politics. Le Pen’s programme, by contrast, is mean, nativistic, protectionist and tragic. Its motor is fear, not confidence; panic, not experimentation. It has nothing in common with Brexit. I am a Brexiteer against Le Pen, and there are many of us. Today’s Macron-loving front pages once again give the impression that Brexit was the starting pistol of a sinister new

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,

Oh dear. Today Jeremy Corbyn kicked off Labour’s general election campaign with a speech on his party’s vision for a fairer society — complaining that the current system was rigged. However, confusion over whether Labour would consider holding a second referendum, if elected, distracted from the message. Now Dawn Butler has dealt the party another blow with a disastrous interview on Radio 4’s PM. The Labour MP appeared to be having a bad day as she blustered through the interview with Eddie Mair — claiming this election was May’s attempt at rigging democracy: ‘Labour will make this country fairer and that’s how they will overturn a rigged system. This election

In the early hours of 9 June 2017, Jeremy Corbyn conceded defeat. For the luckless political journalists forced to cover the Labour campaign this was a rare moment. The leader of the opposition had avoided the press and public. Now, as Labour was going down to its worst defeat since 1935, Corbyn was at last prepared to take questions. But not before he had made one of the most graceless concession speeches in British political history. He offered no apologies to the scores of Labour MPs who had lost their seats or the millions of voters who needed an alternative to conservatism. He accepted no responsibility. On the contrary, the

‘But you promised!’ Anyone who spends much time with children (whether in an Andrea Leadsom-esque capacity as a mother or otherwise) will recognise that phrase. They’re the words of someone disappointed that the grown ups, who are supposed to be sensible, haven’t followed through. Today Theresa May broke her own promise about there being no early general election. Will helpfully reminds you of five of those promises, repeated by both the Prime Minister and her henchmen, in this post. She had been so adamant that even those who thought they knew her best after years of working together in Opposition and government had taken her at her word and were

This week Nick Robinson set the cat among the pigeons when he claimed that the BBC no longer has a duty to ‘broadly balance’ the views of Remain and Leave in its Brexit reports now that the EU referendum is over. However, many have questioned Robinson’s so-called  ‘due impartiality’ — with 70 Eurosceptic MPs previously signing a letter accusing the BBC of a biased and ‘pessimistic’ view. But could the gloomy tone really be down to a sense of Brexit guilt? Mr S only asks after coming across Simon Jenkins’ column in the Guardian on the monoculture at the BBC. Discussing Robinson’s comments on Brexit reporting, Jenkins claims that after the Leave vote, Lord Hall — the BBC

The decision by Conservative MPs to walk away from the Commons Committee on Exiting the EU is one of the most unintentionally revealing abdications of duty I have seen. The report they refused to endorse was polite to the point of blandness. The necessity of securing cross-party approval meant that its restrained language bore little relation to the chaos in Whitehall the committee’s hearings had uncovered. In March, the committee’s chair, Hilary Benn, showed its extent when he submitted David Davis to a tough cross-examination which the Brexit Secretary was lamentably unable to withstand. Although ministers were parroting the line that ‘no deal was better than a bad deal’, Benn

Michael Howard – ‘Show resolve’ over Gibraltar Former Conservative leader Michael Howard caused a stir on social media after his appearance on the Sunday Politics regarding his comments about Spain and Gibraltar. Interviewed by Andrew Neil, Howard stated that the British government should respond ‘as it has responded, by making it absolutely clear that we will stand by Gibraltar.’ He then continued: ‘35 years ago this week Andrew, another woman Prime Minister sent a taskforce halfway across the world to protect another small group of British people against another Spanish speaking country, and I’m absolutely clear that our current woman Prime Minister will show the same resolve in relation to

On last night’s Question Time, David Dimbleby chaired a panel — comprised of Ruth Davidson, Lisa Nandy, Paul Nuttall, Len McCluskey and the IEA’s Kate Andrews — from Carlisle. With the Unite election underway, McCluskey — who is standing for re-election — tried to use his appearance to defend Labour’s bad polling under Jeremy Corbyn, Explaining why his comrade had such bad popularity ratings, Red Len criticised the MSM (aka Mainstream Media) for creating a ‘horrible horrible media barrier’. But the bigger problem, according to Len, is the PLP. He said that before the Labour coup last summer — which saw Corbyn’s shadow cabinet resign and Owen Smith mount a leadership challenge